Specialized Technologies of S⁴

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ID     : 1374-003
TITLE  : Specialized Technologies of S4
AUTHOR : Seven Swords Special Service
AUTHOR2: Division of Documents & Records
DATE   : 143/2300, revised 003/2348
CLASS  : Top Secret XRAY
INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS CURRENT AND SENSITIVE.

Table of Contents
• Introduction
• FLASH communication system

This document contains information on the design and use of various specialized technologies developed or used by S⁴. Some technologies are unavailable to other groups, while others are variants of common items. In all cases, the exact technology or item described here was developed by, or in conjuction with, S⁴ operatives.

The original documentation was from 2300, and has been updated to be current as of 2348. Technologies, old or new, developed or used by other major branches of Seven Worlds organizations are not described here. Most notably, this means that much of Trident/RMBK's developments are not included.

With the capture and death of Eldan Abon-Kar in 2132, the need for a secure, untraceable, communication system was painfully clear to the survivors of the Imperial crackdown. Various encryption and covert channel schemes were devised for ship-borne communications in the following years. Although secure, these methods were ineffecient and awkward; the communication time could be several months. With the widespread deployment of FTL communication arrays throughout known space, the nascent S⁴ had the infrastructure for an effecient, high-bandwidth, secure communication network.

This network is code-named FLASH, and consists of covert encrypted channels between small FTL communication transmitters. As anyone familiar with FTL communications knows, transceivers are small Jump drives that maintain constant Jumpspaces between two communication nodes; the Jumpspace is used as a pathway for communication lasers, with enormous potential bandwidth on each beam. FLASH transcievers follow the same basic principle, but have several additions to reduce the chances of detection and eavesdropping.

FLASH transceivers are very small; the transmission unit uses one of the smallest Field Generators yet devised, which produces a Jumpspace that is a mere 0.05 mm across. Power is supplied from nearly any source, from chemical batteries (for short assignments) to the local power grid of a city; consumption is small enough to allow chemical batteries a run time of minutes, and an undetectable drain on a city power grid. The positioning and tracking equipment are of exceptionally small size, and average precision - the communication links are not meant to be continously maintained, so loss of lock is not a great problem. Because of the small size of the Jumpspace, disturbances to the local gravity gradients are minimal, making it difficult to detect the operating transceiver at anything but very short (<20 m) ranges. The endpoint of the communication, of course, cannot be derived from the transceiver.

Due to the small size of the Jumpspace, FLASH transceivers do not have tremendous range; nothing close to the range required to reach the Seven Worlds from the Starguild. To overcome this, the engineers designing the FLASH transceiver devised a novel solution - FLASH transceivers aim themselves towards the nearest outbound FTL communication relay. The FLASH Jumpspace intersects the normal, continously open, relay Jumpspace. At the intersection, the two Jumpspaces merge, allowing the FLASH transceiver to inject additional traffic into the communication link. Again, the small size and low power of the FLASH Jumpspace prevent significant fluctuation in the relay Jumpspace, much less Jumpspace collapse.

FLASH traffic being added to the normal FTL communication network is suitably packaged so that it is routed to some communication relay in the Starguild that has been infiltrated. With a communication relay in every inhabited system, and most unihabited ones, S⁴ has hundreds of relays to choose from. The infiltration is subtle, and simply consists of altering the software on the relay to interpret particular destinations as a local radio network, and broadcast the data; as an extra precaution, no logs are maintained of these messages. The radio transmissions are received by a covert FTL relay in the same system, which maintains a link to the Seven Worlds or another S⁴ relay.

In the event that a Starguild listening post received the radio transmissions, they are encrypted with pseudo-random one-time pads. The actual encryption function is rather complex and varies between agents and over time. To prevent enemy intelligence from tracking the network itself, the routing paths are randomly chosen and not always optimal. Returning messages are delivered directly to the local FLASH transceiver from the powerful covert relays. Malformed or altered messages (as indicated by a checksum hash) are cause for an immediate blocking of traffic by relays further along the communication chain. Contact can be reestablished only by S⁴ headquarters; procedure requires another agent to determine the fate of the potentially compromised source. In this way, even if an agent and his FLASH transceiver are captured intact, the chain cannot be followed back to the leaders.

To reduce the chance of detection of the FLASH traffic and hence the covert FTL relays, all traffic is done in short, high-bandwidth bursts. As the traffic takes different paths each time, and the volume is insignigicant compared to the legitimate FTL traffic, none in the Starguild communication infrastructure even suspect the existance of the FLASH system. Imperial Intelligence realizes that there must be some communication method, but they have yet to determine how it is accomplished.