The vast majority of intercontinental global Internet
traffic—upwards of 95 percent—travels over undersea cables that run across the ocean floor.
These hundreds of cables, owned by combinations of private and state-owned entities, support everything from consumer shopping to government document
sharing to scientific research on the Internet. The security
and resilience of undersea cables and the data and services that move across them are an often understudied
and underappreciated element of modern Internet geopolitics. The construction of new submarine cables is a key
part of the constantly changing physical topology of the
Internet worldwide.
Three trends are increasing the risks to undersea cables’
security and resilience: First, authoritarian governments,
especially in Beijing, are reshaping the Internet’s physical
layout through companies that control Internet infrastructure, to route data more favorably, gain better control of
internet chokepoints, and potentially gain espionage advantage. Second, more companies that manage undersea
cables are using network management systems to centralize control over components (such as reconfigurable
optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) and robotic patch
bays in remote network operations centers), which introduces new levels of operational security risk. Third, the
explosive growth of cloud computing has increased t
