PRJ-001 — Sybil bounding in LEO access networks

Automated identity abuse is cheap on the terrestrial Internet because an adversary can mint identities in software. This project asks whether low Earth orbit access removes that asymmetry. Propagation delay and Doppler on a LEO link are not values a client asserts; they are properties of the received signal, fixed jointly by the serving satellites’ ephemeris and the terminal’s ground position. An operator already measures them. The project shows that this makes terminal position recoverable to a few metres, that a single-beam adversary cannot shift its apparent position at all, and that identity multiplicity is therefore bounded by physical terminal deployment rather than by compute.

Research question

RQ-001

Hypotheses

HYP-001

Thesis chapter

CH05

Experiments

EXP-001 (E1 to E8)

Publications

PUB-001 — IEEE ICC 2027, CISS symposium

Status

active — paper complete, not yet submitted

Headline result

Under simultaneous multi-satellite observation with the terminal clock bias jointly estimated, a single-beam adversary applying any uniform transmit-time offset induces exactly zero horizontal position displacement, because that offset lies in the clock-bias column of the geometry matrix. This is a linear-algebra identity, not an empirical bound: measured across 384 spoof attempts on real ephemeris with applied offsets reaching 22.6 km of range, the worst displacement achieved was $1.51 \times 10^{-10}$ m.

Pages

Origin

The project came out of two literature studies, one on caching in space edge compute and one on bot prevention in space edge compute. The second returned a negative result: bot prevention in the web-security sense has no published treatment situated in orbital or satellite edge compute. Analysing why terrestrial defences fail there — latency kills interactive challenges, CGNAT kills IP reputation, sub-ten-minute passes kill behavioural profiling — produced the observation that the space edge supplies one signal the terrestrial edge does not, and this project tests it.

Code

Two Rust crates. The repository is currently private pending publication; access is available on request until it is opened.

Operating instructions are in SIMULATION.md at that repository’s root. Every number on the results page is regenerable from the archived element set and a fixed seed.

Working directories

These live under archive/projects/PRJ-001-sybil-bounding-leo/, the mirror of this page in the working tree, and hold material that is not yet a registered artifact. Anything promoted out of them gets an identifier and moves to artifacts.