Eavesdropping on Internal Networks via Unencrypted Satellites

Summary

What did your study do? We set up a consumer-grade satellite dish on the roof of a university building in San Diego, California with a positioning motor and a consumer-grade TV tuner card to capture raw bytes. We then scanned for all transponders (position and frequency) visible from our fixed location, and wrote custom protocol-parsing code to reconstruct network packets from the quirky custom protocol stacks we reverse-engineered from different vendors. We observed 411 transponders across 39 GEO satellites, and our single fixed-location dish could receive IP traffic from 14% of all global Ku-band satellites. Why aren't all GEO satellite links encrypted? There are direct costs to enabling encryption. Encryption imposes additional overhead to an already limited bandwidth, decryption hardware may exceed the power budget of remote, off-grid receivers, and satellite terminal vendors can charge additional license fees for enabling link-layer encryption. In addition, encryption makes it harder to troubleshoot network issues and can degrade the reliability of emergency services. Some users may forgo encryption intentionally; others may be unaware these links are unencrypted or underestimate the risk and ease of eavesdropping attacks. While significant academic and activist attention has been put into ensuring nearly universal use of encryption for modern web browsers, there has been much less visiblity and attention paid to satellite network communications. Several vendors told us they were in the process of transitioning to encrypted links. What about Starlink/LEO? Our study focused on GEO satellite systems, which remain in a fixed point relative to the surface of the earth. These systems remain in wide use for critical infrastructure because of their reliability and backwards compatibility. We did not study LEO (Low Earth Orbit) systems (e.g., Starlink), which offer higher bandwidth and greater coverage but require more complicated receiving hardware. Our understanding ...