Key to robust communication especially in space! — Have you heard about a NASA mission that communicated despite a malfunctioning antenna? This was the challenge for the Galileo spacecraft. Intended to deploy its high-gain antenna (HGA) for long-distance communication to Earth, a mechanical glitch hindered its deployment. With only low-gain antennas available, maintaining data integrity became crucial.

NASA’s way to communicate in space — Communication with satellites or space probes involves addressing several challenges, ensuring reliable transmission of data from space to Earth and vice versa. Signal Strength and Attenuation — the signal strength diminishes as it travels vast distances. This requires large antennas on Earth to receive the weakened signals and strengthen it. …

More than just GPS — Do you know that Europe has its own GPS satelites? It’s called Galileo system. While both the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and Europe’s Galileo are global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), there are some key differences between them. Primarily, Galileo is under civilian control, making it independent from military objectives…

How to make it robust and secure? — Thanks to the rising popularity of small satellites, especially CubeSats, space communication has become increasingly common. To guarantee the security and reliability of these signals, we employ Transmission Security or TRANSEC. Let’s delve into its requirements and the mechanisms behind it. TRANSEC uses specific mechanisms to safeguard signals against: …

By using error corrections methods — Classic computers excel at evaluating the results of equations, while quantum computers excel at uncovering hidden dependencies or patterns. However, both types of machines might not be as efficient in correcting errors. This is why, for future cryptography, we’re considering using error correction codes in the encryption process. Currently, when…

In breaking current cryptography. — The strength of many encryption methods lies in the challenge of breaking down a large number into its prime components. The objective? Identify which two secret prime numbers, when multiplied, produce that large number. Traditional computers might spent ages on this task. Yet, for quantum computers, there’s Shor’s algorithm that…

By using Learing with Errors Problem — Computers don’t make mistakes in calculations, do they? People do, but can we exploit this? It appears we can, especially in the realm of cryptography. This might protect our encryption from being cracked even by quantum computers. Let’s delve into it. First, assume we have two secrets represented by weights…

Understanding the hash function — Imagine you have a magical scanner. Every time you feed it a document, it gives you a unique fingerprint for that document. This fingerprint acts as a special code, representing the content of the document. That’s how the hash functions works. Here are the features of this magical scanner, which…

What is it and is it safe against quantum computers? — Imagine a house with a door that’s easy to latch but very hard to unlock unless you have the key. That’s the basic idea behind a “trapdoor function” in cryptography. A trapdoor function is a function that is easy to compute in one direction but hard in the opposite direction…