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The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

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Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#241

Post by wmf »

fomine3 wrote: post #236
GuB-42 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OP may indicates PS3's poor security drama.

PS3 was one of the more secure consoles but of course it only takes one vulnerability.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#242

Post by a_t48 »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #237
sneak wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

When I worked at SpaceX, lots of software folk used an internal IRC server. One time I created a chatbot that would execute arbitrary python commands on my workstation. Knowing that coworkers would maliciously try to pwn my computer, I ran it in a chroot with very restricted permissions. It took about 20 minutes for someone to figure out how to fork bomb it hard enough to lock up my system. Another time as a team bui…

If alls fair in love and war, at that point I’d start yanking power cables in response. ;)

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#243

Post by [deleted] »

jstanley wrote: post #209
olalonde wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How accurate does the location have to be in terms of radius? A few centimeters? A few meters?

If you trick it into thinking you're a few metres away from your true location then you're not evading any geofence that you couldn't trivially evade simply by moving a few metres.

[deleted]

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#245

Post by londons_explore »

TrueDuality wrote: post #204
gtvwill wrote: post #188

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.

The value of this attack isn't breaking into the terminal itself, but that it allows the end user to modify the control channel to the satellite. It allows internal inspection of the protocols, authentication, data formats, etc between the terminal and the satellite itself. I assume that the actual received and transmitted packets from the terminal are encrypted so "outside in" inspection is very very difficult.

These are all things I would expect to have access to if I had purchased the dish.

This hack just gives the user access to what they should always have had access to.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#246

Post by stephen_g »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #7

Is there any mitigation against these kinds of power/timing attacks? I think the Switch was originally hacked this way.

Usually equipment that has to be robust against this attack will have things like tamper switches that wipe storage keys and brick the device if it’s opened. I’d assume they also have software tripwires too if you manage to get the access you need (for instance if you drilled holes through the enclosure to access areas you needed without opening it - although if you really wanted to stop that you can do things like potting much of the board in epoxy that is extremely difficult to remove without destroying things).

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#247

Post by londons_explore »

thereddaikon wrote: post #57
tg180 wrote: post #23

The article compares the Russian jamming of Viasat with the compromise of a Starlink UT. No, no, no... This is really wrong! > As is typically the case with any technology, the increase in use and deployment of Starlink and other satellite constellations also means that threat actors have a greater interest in finding their security holes to attack them. > Indeed, Russia saw an advantage in taking out a satellite pro…

Starlink by its nature of using phased array antennas are inherently pretty hard to jam through traditional means. Not impossible but more difficult than older systems with simpler antennas.

Buuuut.... If you wanted to jam starlink, then having full access to a terminal would be a really good start....

For example you could modify the terminal to transmit at the exact time another user is supposed to be transmitting, therefore clobbering their data and DoS-ing them.

The transmission schedule of exactly which user should be transmitting in which slots is probably transmitted with a single encryption key the terminal has access to.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#248

Post by jpoesen »

londons_explore wrote: post #245
TrueDuality wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of this attack isn't breaking into the terminal itself, but that it allows the end user to modify the control channel to the satellite. It allows internal inspection of the protocols, authentication, data formats, etc between the terminal and the satellite itself. I assume that the actual received and transmitted packets from the terminal are encrypted so "outside in" inspection is very very difficult.

These are all things I would expect to have access to if I had purchased the dish. This hack just gives the user access to what they should always have had access to.

If you expect all commercial hardware you buy to be open hardware, you're in for a frustrating ride.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#249

Post by IshKebab »

jpoesen wrote: post #248
londons_explore wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all things I would expect to have access to if I had purchased the dish. This hack just gives the user access to what they should always have had access to.

If you expect all commercial hardware you buy to be open hardware, you're in for a frustrating ride.

I think he meant what he would like to happen not when he predicts will happen. "I expect you to behave yourself" not "I expect that you will behave yourself".

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#250

Post by mnahkies »

sneak wrote: post #211
yarg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I was a big fan of modded playstation portables back in the day, to do it you would take a particular model of battery and remove one terminal or something similar which would activate a debug mode that let you flash it.

They fixed that with the newer batteries as I recall but was a pretty big hole at release

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