Abstract
Mankind is actively trying to communicate with extraterrestrial life. However, historically the discovery of new civilizations has led to war, subjugation, and even elimination. With that in mind, we believe that for any attempted contact with extraterrestrials our location must not be revealed. Therefore, we focus on the problem of location-private interstellar communication. We approach this as a security problem and propose to work towards solutions with tools from the domain of secure communications. As a first step, we give proposals for adversary models, security requirements, and security controls.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that revealing possession of rare minerals to foreigners has historically not worked well on Earth.
- 2.
Admittedly, with the drawback of a relatively low bitrate and quite significant APBDC (Average Per-Bit Delivery Cost).
- 3.
This increases the burden of extraterrestrials trying to trace their reply back to us.
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Jonker, H., Mauw, S., Radomirović, S. (2015). Location-Private Interstellar Communication. In: Christianson, B., Švenda, P., Matyáš, V., Malcolm, J., Stajano, F., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXIII. Security Protocols 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26096-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26096-9_11
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