The vast majority of intercontinental global Internet traffic—upwards of 95 percent—travels over un-dersea cables that run across the ocean floor. These hundreds of cables, owned by combina-tions of private and state-owned entities, support every-thing from consumer shopping to government document sharing to scientific research on the Internet. The security and resilience of undersea cables and the data and ser-vices that move across them are an often understudied and underappreciated element of modern Internet geo-politics. 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 infrastruc-ture, to route data more favorably, gain better control of internet chokepoints, and potentially gain espionage ad-vantage. Second, more companies that manage undersea cables are using network management systems to cen-tralize control over components (such as reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) and robotic patch bays in remote network operations centers), which intro-duces new levels of operational security risk. Third, the explosive growth of cloud computing has increased the volume and sensitivity of data crossing these cables.
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