[dohko]

More than a full (unlikely) hack on Curiosity that would potentially allow to hijack it; I would be interested in finding out how feasiable direct signal de-cryption is. Specifically I can't immagine curiosity having too much of a sophisticated encryption system. Just by knowing a little bit about embedded-systems and hardware encryption, it is probably something like 3DES or AES-256 with a firmware stored symmetric key. This means that the key used to encrypt signals won't change too often and therefore I wonder how hard would it be to break it and get a hold on Curiosity's image and commands feed.