[Ground-station] Follow up for Uplink Authentication/Authorization

[Michelle Thompson]

Questions received:

Q1: What is the lifetime of the auth token?  Is it only now? Is it one
day?  Is it one month or year?  100 users concurrent is your
design goal with max of 1000 (rare).

I'll speak to what I know, and invite others to reply.

The answer to any good question is that "it depends".

A long-term QSO cluster doesn't need many tokens, but a rapidly changing
emergency communications situation may require a lot of turnover of tokens
because of team shifts. If we model for the worst case then everything is
taken care of, but the overhead is then stuck at "higher".

Maybe dynamic field length for the token would be a fun thing to
implement, based on request rate. I don't think anyone has done that
before. We'd have to be super careful on the abuse and malfunction side,
but that's a paper in and of itself.

Q2: How many users total would want tokens simultaneously?

This is a good question. Not many, really - any one groundsat or satellite
won't serve more than 1000 maximum, with current bandplan and architecture.

The number of amateur radio operators is indeed small. There's no growth in
the US and decline everywhere else. Let's do our best to design something
that makes sense in open source digital radio as well as the amateur
satellite service. Let's assume we could attract a community of 1000
operators. This is much larger than the current active user base of amateur
sat ops in the US.

Q3: What about Ham IOT? Can this be a "service" for that? Each ham has a
lot of devices?

Yes, perhaps, and those tokens would probably be persistent. This is a
third class after voice and data.

Anyone have some use cases for Ham IoT? Telemetry for GOES receivers?
SATNogs? Please speak up.

-Michelle Thompson
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