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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

#131

Post by unixbane »

29athrowaway wrote: post #51

Certainly it did not cost $25 to develop the modchip. If you put in the labor and software related cost it's not $25.

I have quit the software industry and now get paid what people _should_ get paid for software which is a small fraction of what I was being paid before. By choosing to work on actual real problems, instead of partaking in the pseudo-intellectual clout chasing contest that is the tech industry, I have discovered the real value of software which was never much to begin with as I assumed it was when I was a kid.

tl;dr yep, he could have been shoveling CRUD shit and making more money, or implementing high end algorithms within broken operating systems, or implementing high end algorithms with insufficient education or time to prove them, while getting dumber

scratch that he got a bug bounty for his work so his net gain is equal. check mate

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#132

Post by TechBro8615 »

pelorat wrote: post #127
russdill wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Locking down user terminals is one part of starlink security. Breaking that is a huge accomplishment. It appears that the other layers still prevent this from being a full blown attack, but that may just be a matter of time.

Sure, but an attack to do what? Even with full hardware access there's nothing that can be done with the network itself, nor can it be used to snoop on other users, nor does it give some access to the satellites themselves. It's akin to rooting your ISP provided modem.

If you root your ISP provided modem, aren’t you one step closer to exploiting some bug in DOCSIS? Similarly here wouldn’t you be one step closer to exploiting the “network itself?” (Air-quotes because I’m not actually sure what that means in this context.)

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#133

Post by bee_rider »

ec109685 wrote: post #92
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.

Curious why an iPhone been susceptible to this type of hack before?

I think you mean:

> Curious why an iPhone hasn't been susceptible to this type of hack before?

The answer is probably, "it's complicated." These sort of hardware hacks are quite clever, and typically depend on using chips in unintended ways -- I mean most circuits will have some undefined behavior if you start shorting parts!

There are lots of reasons an iPhone might not get a widely popularized exploit like this. Firstly it might be low-priority -- iPhones are general purpose computing devices, so there are usually software bugs for people who want to root their iPhones. Second, it might legitimately be more difficult. Apple has lots of experience in hardware, their circuits might be more robust. And iPhones are quite tightly integrated, it might be hard to sort out which parts you need to short when everything is on a handful of chips.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#134

Post by bee_rider »

enlyth wrote: post #125
bee_rider wrote: post #117

Hacking in the older "using a device in an unexpected/unsupported way," not "black-hat hacking" I guess. Typical over-dramatic Wired. Hats off to this guy, hardware hacks always impress.

Isn't the literal name of this website using the same definition, as in tinkering with something?

True!

To my reading, "the hacking of Starlink terminals has begun" is a little bit ominous looking, but maybe the error is on my side.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#135

Post by zdragnar »

enlyth wrote: post #125
bee_rider wrote: post #117

Hacking in the older "using a device in an unexpected/unsupported way," not "black-hat hacking" I guess. Typical over-dramatic Wired. Hats off to this guy, hardware hacks always impress.

Isn't the literal name of this website using the same definition, as in tinkering with something?

IIRC this website was born of a novel use of the term 'hacking' in the startup space- hacking business growth.

Here, hacking is a more well established term- hacking networking hardware is something I suspect most people would associate with black-hat type hacking.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#136

Post by [deleted] »

bri3d wrote: post #113
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 orig…

[deleted]

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#137

Post by bpodgursky »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #132
pelorat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but an attack to do what? Even with full hardware access there's nothing that can be done with the network itself, nor can it be used to snoop on other users, nor does it give some access to the satellites themselves. It's akin to rooting your ISP provided modem.

If you root your ISP provided modem, aren’t you one step closer to exploiting some bug in DOCSIS? Similarly here wouldn’t you be one step closer to exploiting the “network itself?” (Air-quotes because I’m not actually sure what that means in this context.)

If you root your Android, are you one step closer to hacking the 5G network?

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#138

Post by gpm »

zdragnar wrote: post #135
enlyth wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the literal name of this website using the same definition, as in tinkering with something?

IIRC this website was born of a novel use of the term 'hacking' in the startup space- hacking business growth. Here, hacking is a more well established term- hacking networking hardware is something I suspect most people would associate with black-hat type hacking.

As I understand the website was born out of MITs use of the term "hacking" to mean... well... what the website means by it.

Wikipedia claims the term was widespread by the 60s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#139

Post by extheat »

armchairhacker wrote: post #115
xaduha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is one for PS5, no hardware hack needed. I don’t know about Xbox.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#140

Post by CyanBird »

upupandup wrote: post #98
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.

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