The United States military and independent researchers have become more focused on the security of satellites. These devices were built with longevity in mind, but were never intended to be ultra-secure. At the ShmooCon security conference in Washington, DC, on Friday, embedded device security researcher Karl Koscher raised questions about a different phase of a satellite's life cycle.
Koscher and his colleagues were given permission last year to use the Canadian satellite Anik F1R, which was launched to support Canadian broadcasters in 2005 and is designed for 15 years of use. Below the US southern border and out to Hawaii and the easternmost part of Russia, the satellite has coverage. Most of the services that use the satellite have already migrated to a new satellite. Koscher was able to take over and broadcast to the Northern Hemisphere using special access to an uplink license and transponder slot lease.
Koscher and his colleagues from the Shadytel telecommunications and embedded device hacking group broadcast a live stream from ToorCon San Diego in October. At ShmooCon last week, he explained the tools they used to turn an uplink facility into a command center for broadcasting from the satellite.
AdvertisementIn this case, the researchers had permission to access both the uplink facility and the satellite, but the experiment highlights an interesting gray area when a satellite is not being used but is still in its final resting place.
If you can generate a strong enough signal to make it there, the satellite will send it back down to the Earth. Whoever else was using that particular transponder spot would need to be defeated if a satellite were fully utilized.
Whoever yells loudest into a microphone will have their voice amplified the most, but it is difficult to beat established broadcasting giants. In 1986, a hacker who called himself Captain Midnight broke into a broadcast of The Falcon and the Snowman by hijacking a satellite signal.
The hackers have taken advantage of satellites for their own purposes. The Brazilian Federal Police arrested 39 people on suspicion of hijacking US Navy satellites using high-powered antennas and other ad hoc gear for their own CB short-distance radio communications.
Koscher points out that the lack of controls on satellites could allow countries to hijack each others equipment.
One could take over even newish satellites, according to Ang Cui, an embedded device security researcher who launched the NyanSat open source ground station project in 2020. There are things that are hanging out up there, he says.
From a freedom-of-information perspective, satellite uplink capabilities could be reimagined as plentiful and available rather than exclusive and scarce.
The story was originally on wired.com.
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