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The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

wired.com

261–267 of 267 posts

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#261
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get to dictate to Microsoft what is and isn’t allowed on github.com. Microsoft will not fight a 1A battle against one of their biggest and oldest partners. Not only are they one of their largest customers, they have physical control over the place where Microsoft and GitHub staff live and work.

... you mean the US, possibly allies? Not only is that broad enough to be meaningless, I don't know offhand of any military going to someone's house to require them (by force I assume) to change their GitHub repo name. What are you getting at?

I'm getting at the fact that Wikileaks can't have private GitHub repos that are actually private.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#262

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

You can make the code more robust. For example, instead of a yes/no check, make the check come up with a symmetric crypto key to decrypt the next chunk of code (if it also passes a hash check). Glitches will end up generating garbage, and even if you successfully glitch the hash check, you're executing random garbage.

Of course, the challenge there is that you've merely eliminated one glitching candidate.

Stuxnet had code blocks that encrypted by a hash of target hardware identifiers. No way to know what all code is contained, until it happens to run on the target system.

https://blog.quarkslab.com/bradley-hash-and-decrypt-gauss-a-...

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#263
post #205

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?

Hackers damaged/destroyed the ROSAT satellite in the late 90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROSAT#End_of_operations

Your link contradicts that (or at least has NASA denying it):

> However, NASA officials in charge of the day-to-day operations of the ROSAT mission at Goddard, including GSFC Rosat Project Scientist Rob Petre, say definitively that no such incident occurred. Talleur's information appears to have come from one of his interns who exaggerated a hacking incident on an office computer not related to flight operations.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#264

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

This particular glitch seems to rely on Unix shells not differentiating between false test and failure. Implementing this in any other language would have avoided this particular glitch.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#265
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…

> Viasat orbits at 22,000 miles, Starlink is in LEO. Precisely for this reason Starlink is naturally more resistant to jamming, and is used in Ukraine because of this.

Orbit height is incredibly and completely irrelevant to the ease of breaking into systems...

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#266

Planet Labs really missed the boat here. Could've easily beat SpaceX

Planet isn't an internet service provider company.

Even if they wanted to become one, they'd need access to tremendous amounts of capital and low launch costs to re-create what Starlink is.

It's an open question if Amazon will be able to compete with it's eventual system or not.

Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

#267
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackers damaged/destroyed the ROSAT satellite in the late 90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROSAT#End_of_operations

Your link contradicts that (or at least has NASA denying it): > However, NASA officials in charge of the day-to-day operations of the ROSAT mission at Goddard, including GSFC Rosat Project Scientist Rob Petre, say definitively that no such incident occurred. Talleur's information appears to have come from one of his interns who exaggerated a hacking incident on an office computer not related to flight operations.

Ah, you're right - I'd vaguely remembered seeing this before and pasted the wikipedia section without reading it thoroughly. My mistake!
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