231–240 of 267 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Great response by SpaceX: https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkWelcomesSecuri... “Bring on the bugs”. This is how you properly engage the security community. In times where journalists are taken to court for looking at a webpage’s HTML source it’s really great seeing a company that “gets it”. Kudos.
At least if you find a bug, go and exploit it and bring the satellite down. This way we can all have some fun, not just the VPs sitting on the company board. And then they call their conferences with menacing names such as 'Black Hat' or 'DEFCON'. Sounds more like pony-con to me.
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?
Eh low threat hack. Requires physical access to dish and installs piece of easily identifiable hardware. Tbh give unfettered access to most hardware and you can hack it.
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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
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> If the remote machines have the assumption of trustworthy terminals baked in, Given the general competence level of the engineering at SpaceX, I would not put any money on this being true. Maybe if the system were designed by Sony...
Even Sony doesn't considers its terminals trustworthy. They really don't want you to root your PlayStation, but that's mostly because it allows you to hack offline games. Hacked consoles are usually banned pretty quickly from online services. It doesn't mean Sony has the best track record when it comes to security just that they are not completely clueless.
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The terminal is used to contact the constellation as well as Starlink's backend servers. If the remote machines have the assumption of trustworthy terminals baked in, then this isn't a low threat hack.
> If the remote machines have the assumption of trustworthy terminals baked in, Given the general competence level of the engineering at SpaceX, I would not put any money on this being true. Maybe if the system were designed by Sony...
Another time as a team building activity, we were using mission control and backup mission control to play a multiplayer space ship bridge simulator game. My team was winning, up until our terminals started failing. Someone on the other team had credentials to the IT system, and was remotely rebooting them.
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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.
Presumably micro missiles would be smaller than micro sats, so the only thing you’d need is to launch one large missile full of micro missiles that then each take out one satalite. After that… I imagine it’d become impossible to launch anything ever again. So much debris in LEO would be depressing (though maybe the satellites could be given a deorbit burn order before being exploded, if it ever became clear they’d go…
In addition, its far harder then you would think. Each such missile would still need complex computer system and propulsion hardware and so on. It would be cheaper then a Starlink sat but not by that much.
Also, even if you assume 1/10 the weight, SpaceX can easily launch 10x more then Russia can. With Starship coming online SpaceX by themselves can launch 100x what Russia can.
And of course if Russia did such a think SpaceX would have US government support.
> After that… I imagine it’d become impossible to launch anything ever again.
I do not think this is actually true. The decay is to fast on this altitude for this to actually happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excellent. Now repeat that feat 2500 times to destroy all existing Starlink satellites, and keep doing it 1300 times each year to destroy all the new Starlink satellites that are being launched. Assuming of course that SpaceX will not increase its launch cadence, and that this act of war will not provoke a response that stops is. The concept is laughable. It is intractable at every level of execution.
Except you don't need one ASAT launch per satellite it's completely asymmetric. The debris in low Earth orbit travels 10,000-15,000 miles an hour. The high energy debris in LEO does all the work. A 1cm piece of debris would render other satellites useless. Your idea that space will somehow not be militarized is quite laughable. There's an actual history that proves you wrong: https://hir.harvard.edu/anti-satellite-we…
On this altitude debris would quickly drop out so you would never get Kessler synonym.
Russia would have to shoot down a huge amount of sats.
And SpaceX can easily have 100-1000x the upmass of Russia.
And this is before you can consider lots of counter-measures the US could potentially do.