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The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

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Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#181

Post by nine_k »

mlyle wrote: post #107
nine_k wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a system is not resilient against rooting a terminal which is in user's physical possession, it's a design flaw. Or, rather, the more resilient the system as a whole is to compromises of individual terminals, the better the design is. Assuming such compromise never happens would be outright incompetent.

You might very well want both E.g. You may want to protect end users against implants and other attacks from physical tampering with their terminals. You might not want hostile parties to have an easy time reverse engineering terminals so they can more easily search for remote vulnerabilities in the terminals. You may not want to hand hostile parties a phased array optimized to transmit to Starlink running arbitrary…

Certainly. Best defence is layered. It makes every layer an impediment for an attacker, but does not fail completely if a layer or two is breached. Among other things, it buys time to react.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#182

Post by walnutclosefarm »

pelorat wrote: post #129
upupandup wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What are you on about. This has nothing to do with the satellites, not can this hardware mod ever be used to affects the hardware in orbit.

That's not necessarily true. Hacking the ground station means in all likelihood getting access to low level protocols between the ground station and satellite, which potentially means getting the ability to affect the satellites. Not a sure thing, but if I wanted to attack a StarLink satellite, this would be a solid first step in doing so.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#183

Post by zdragnar »

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.

I probably should have specified that it was a novel usage within the startup space, not that that was where the term originated.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#184

Post by belltaco »

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.

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

Xbox One didn't have a root exploit for its entire lifetime and counting. It was released back in 2013. That's nine years. So one could say MS "solved it".

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#185

Post by thedougd »

extheat wrote: post #141
thedougd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it gives you direct/raw access to the control plane, you then may be able to launch denial of service and other attacks that would negatively impact the network and other terminals. I don't know anything about the Starlink protocol, but a rough Ethernet analog might be an ARP attack/flood.

That’s like saying you can hack 5G because you can root your phone.

Not rooting your phone, but hacking the baseband. And since we're talking about disassembling devices and performing low voltage attacks to reveal secrets, I would draw the analog to baseband hacking.

https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/topic/how-to-hack-mob...

...found a vulnerability (CVE-2022-20210) that can be abused to disrupt the device’s radio communication via a malformed packet causing a DoS condition. This vulnerability allows attackers can neutralize communications in a specific location.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#187

Post by bayindirh »

greggman3 wrote: post #186

I wonder when the first hacker will hack a satelite, fire it's retro-rockets to make it crash and cause the Kessler Syndrome, intentionally or not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome Of course that could also happen with random bugs and no hacking I guess?

There are already people who talk with satellites, recover them or make older ones work again. It’s one google search away.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#189

Post by bogomipz »

panick21_ wrote: post #114
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.

Except Russia already proved they can shoot satellites out of space as they did almost a year ago with their Nudol ASAT weapon test:

https://archive.ph/1tdHl

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#190

Post by Scoundreller »

ajross wrote: post #155
upupandup wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you write a comment like that every time someone roots a cable modem too? That seems a little over the top. This is an exploit of the base station device. It seems that it might be used to grant access for which the owner hadn't paid, but that's also something that can be trivially patched around at the routing level ("sure, it's a valid base station, but if it's not on the list of paying customers it doesn't get…

Should be possible to DoS your area in the footprint, so everyone within a few hundred kilometers around you?

A phased array helps but you could also have a heliostat-type setup that tracks the satellite.

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