Security researchers have discovered that anyone with internet access can imitate the toilet habits of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS).
Anonymous cybersecurity analyst, his name is Gi7w0rm Works with services that scan for vulnerable devices on the internet, I happened to discover that there are two urine-related data feeds from the ISS. One showed the fill rate of the urine tanks on the space station, and the other showed the status of the processor unit that converts urine into drinking water for astronauts.
In addition to both of these metrics, it includes hundreds of other metrics related to everything from the number of laptops connected to the ISS network to the level of CO2 in the ship’s air. can be viewed online.
Gi7w0rm said he was “not necessarily surprised, but definitely amused” by the discovery. “You can’t always see astronauts pee,” they say.
They stumbled upon the ISS data feed while investigating a vulnerable and “sensitive” government system. Although there was no immediately obvious risk, Gi7w0rm contacted the U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees her IT security, fearing a security breach.
“In the last month, I’ve probably written over 250 voluntary reports to large companies and nations regarding critical vulnerabilities,” Gi7w0rm says. “This included everything from your average business to military contractors. Government, police and critical infrastructure. In this particular case, we were looking for vulnerabilities related to space. ”
NASA was not available for comment before publication, but tristan moodyBoeing systems engineers said the feed was an intentional, albeit outdated, tool that was originally linked to a now-defunct website called ISSlive. “At some point, the original project was abandoned, but the Telemetry His stream lived on. As I remember, it was open to the public around 2011.. “The available data is a very small subset of the thousands of telemetry channels used on the ISS, but it is still interesting,” he says.
Old data feeds are not considered to provide a complete picture of urine recycling on the ISS. The space station’s Environmental Control Life Support System (ECLSS) is a collection of various hardware designed to maintain safe conditions on board the spacecraft. Part of the ECLSS is the urine processor assembly, which receives the waste and separates it into water and brine solutions by distillation.
NASA recently added a brine processor assembly to ECLSS to take that solution and extract more water from it. Recovered water level within ISS reaches 98% – up from about 94 percent. Details for this device are not included in the public feed.
In a statement earlier this year, ECLSS water subsystem manager Jill Williamson said: “Crew members do not drink urine. Their drinking water is recycled, filtered and purified so that it is cleaner than anything we drink on Earth. We produce clean drinking water. We have put a lot of processes in place and have done a lot of ground testing to give us confidence that we are doing the right thing.”
topic:
- international space station/
- data