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The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

wired.com

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Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#111

Post by panick21_ »

jchw wrote: post #87
upupandup wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Realistically, I think it's funded in large parts by U.S. government grants to provide affordable internet to rural areas. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/spacex-starlink-wins-nearly-... Of course though, I'm not sure what the status on that is today . Looks like they may not be able to ride that train anymore: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-rejects-broadband-subsid...

That was never considered a large part of the funding. That would simply have been some additional income over the next decade. And its not happening now anyway.

And given the limited capacity, they might as well use that capacity for other costumers.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#112

Post by czx4f4bd »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #74
bdcravens wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a system is designed to not allow that access, and you can compromise that design, it is most definitely a vulnerability.

I'm convinced that it's impossible to prevent anyone that can physically tamper with a system from having full privileges on that system, as a result of physics. The only way to truly protect information is to make use of quantum effects, and we've only just started doing that in labs. Everything else is just making it harder. So, if you make things harder and someone comes along that invests more effort to overcome,…

Yes. Vulnerabilities exist with respect to a system's expected functionality and must be understood and weighed against other requirements to determine the system's security model. Even if you think the expected functionality is stupid or impossible, that doesn't change the fact that the system has a particular expectation that it doesn't meet and a mechanism by which that expectation can be violated, i.e. a vulnerability.

To put it another way, consider physical locks, which must inherently be able to resist direct physical tampering by an adversary. Under your definition, no flaw in a lock could be considered a vulnerability since any lock can eventually be cracked. The problem is that this doesn't provide us any useful insight, it just makes the word "vulnerability" useless. It's already well-known that any lock can eventually be cracked, but tradeoffs still have to be made in deciding which lock to use for a certain situation.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#113

Post by bri3d »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #74
bdcravens wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a system is designed to not allow that access, and you can compromise that design, it is most definitely a vulnerability.

I'm convinced that it's impossible to prevent anyone that can physically tamper with a system from having full privileges on that system, as a result of physics. The only way to truly protect information is to make use of quantum effects, and we've only just started doing that in labs. Everything else is just making it harder. So, if you make things harder and someone comes along that invests more effort to overcome,…

> So, if you make things harder and someone comes along that invests more effort to overcome, can you really call that a vulnerability?

Yes? This is defense in depth. Anything that bypasses a defense is still a vulnerability, even if your backup defenses protect you.

Defending physical hardware is indeed a theoretical impossibility as on paper, it will always be possible to make a perfect electrical clone of the original hardware and then modify it to suit. However, reality is different, and mitigations against physical access have become much more effective in recent years (iPhone anti-jailbreaking and the Xbox One come to mind as fairly successful).

So, this is a vulnerability indeed, just not a high severity one. One layer of the defenses are bypassed, but the remaining defenses remain.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#114

Post by panick21_ »

ck2 wrote: post #60

Pretty sure Russia has physical satellite killer missiles just like US does? Would a nuke in space even work to take out a group of them, maybe even via an EMP surge or are they hardened? Sometimes I wonder if the world would be more peaceful if cellphone networks couldn't work anymore but there would be so much other chaos so guess not.

Russia does not have the capability of destroying Starlink because the amount of upmass required to destroy them is larger then what the Russians can actually do.

SpaceX replacement rate would be higher then Russia destroy rate.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#115

Post by armchairhacker »

xaduha wrote: post #63
josephcsible wrote: post #26

It shouldn't count as a vulnerability that you can get root of a device that you have physical possession of. If there's any real vulnerability here, it's that having root of your terminal gives you any extra privileges to the rest of the network.

Microsoft and Sony appear to have solved it for their gaming consoles. Satellite TV providers definitely solved it by now after learning from their mistakes. All in all there are plenty of devices in the world that are protected against physical access, so if Starlink tried doing that and failed, then that's definitely through an exploited vulnerability.

> Microsoft and Sony appear to have solved it for their gaming consoles

Have they? I know Apple an Nintendo have been trying for years and we have jailbreak and Homebrew, I believe there is even jailbreak for nintendo switch.

If there isn't yet an exploit to gain root on Xbox and PS5, it's only a matter of time.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#118

Post by croes »

josephcsible wrote: post #26

It shouldn't count as a vulnerability that you can get root of a device that you have physical possession of. If there's any real vulnerability here, it's that having root of your terminal gives you any extra privileges to the rest of the network.

So if you can get root on a PS5 or iPhone it's not a vulnerability?

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#119

Post by bri3d »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #96
14 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xbox 360 had the reset glitch hack where if you powered cycled the chip at the exact right timing you could run unsigned code. It required a small mod chip soldered to some of the smallest points on the motherboard that I have ever soldered. Different versions of the 360 worked better but most worked even if it took a minute or so before the glitched worked and booted into custom firmware. Mine worked really well and…

That's what I was thinking of, the 360 not the Switch.

Yep - the Switch had an issue in the mask ROM / first stage bootloader too, but it was a traditional software one, where the recovery mode bootloader passed an unverified length to a memcpy and smashed the stack.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#120

Post by unixbane »

josephcsible wrote: post #26

It shouldn't count as a vulnerability that you can get root of a device that you have physical possession of. If there's any real vulnerability here, it's that having root of your terminal gives you any extra privileges to the rest of the network.

Yeah this is a typical article where the author gets all excited and explains the technical details of the "hack", because it can be called a "hack". But it seems nothing was done here other than some reverse engineering and bypassing tamper proofing to gain access to his own OS.
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