I'm amazed that they're able to disable a voltage regulator remotely. Did they just build in relays for every single component in case they wanted to rewire everything on the fly or was this something they specifically knew they might want to do 45 years ago?
I can't help but wonder how possible it would be (or would have been at some point in the past) for a person with evil intent to send unauthorized commands to these probes. How are signals authenticated? At this point, is it just that there are only a handful of parties capable of sending a strong enough radio signal to a precise-enough location in space, and who know the position of these probes to the degree of accuracy required?
Well, I think the first obstacle would be acquiring a sufficiently large antenna. Given that the large dishes used in the DSN are 70m (~230ft) across, I suspect somebody would notice…
Your guess is as good as mine I suppose. Not many people have access to a huge antenna with huge transmitting power.
As for authentication: with 16 buts per second and 44 hours round trip, they're not doing some sort of handshake to agree an encryption key. But given these were launched during the Cold War, maybe some basic encryption perhaps, with key of course hardcoded before launch?
I highly doubt it's even authenticated. They're probably just relying on anyone with enough skill and money having easier/better things to attack.
The death of Voyager would not hurt any of America's strategic objectives. It would just make some nerds really bummed, approximately as many in your own country as in America, so what have you gained?
You'll need to hack NASA's deep space network first I think. On your own and with a normal mortal's budget you're not going to be able to do much of anything.
Shortly after launch it was almost certainly not known how communication worked. And if you had a spy that could get you that info, you could just get them to press the wrong button(s) instead.
Putin has limited resources. He'd rather spend them on his stupid war, and also building other weapons and warships, rather than a giant radio antenna and a team of engineers trying to hack a 45-year-old spacecraft's communications protocol, just to screw with NASA.
Some random hobbyists (or even small nation-states) aren't going to be able to build a radio antenna large enough to communicate with deep-space probes like that. That's all the "technical measures" needed.
Yeah, I'd say it's actually pretty common to make spacecraft avionics as remotely switchable as possible. For one thing, there's likely to be a considerable amount of redundancy so that a single component failure doesn't ruin your whole mission. It's good practice to have a way to isolate any component that is anticipated to fail. FDIR is a known acronym: fault detection, isolation and recovery.
