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Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

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Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#81

Post by anilakar »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #30
protocolture wrote: post #7

Had a vendor offer a customer of mine a huge discount if they purchased radios without the encryption license in the year of our lord 2024. Not even WPA or WEP. Just clear across the sky. And this is terrestrial. My bet is that in space there would be a noticable increase in heat/energy if they did encryption by default. But its still incredible to see them pretend like space is impossible to get to, ultimate obscuri…

> My bet is that in space there would be a noticable increase in heat/energy if they did encryption by default. Why would it? The data originates from earth, and should be encrypted during the uplink leg too, so the crypto should all happen in the ground segment (or even well before it reached anything that could be considered part of the satellite setup, honestly).

Satellites have long lifespans and have to outlast current crypto algorithms. Ideally they're nothing more than radio repeaters that rebroadcast the uplink signal.

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#82

Post by jnovacho »

OnACoffeeBreak wrote: post #80

From the Introduction: "Each satellite may carry traffic for dozens of independent networks through an array of on-board transponders, each covering a diameter of thousands of kilometers (at most a third of Earth’s surface)". Can someone help me understand the use of "diameter" in this sentence. I am guessing it refers to the satellite's signal coverage of the Earth's surface. If that's the case, wouldn't something l…

They mean the intersection between the cone produced by the satellite and "illuminated" surface. If the antenna beam is normal to the sphere, it will produce a disk which has an diameter.

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#83

Post by T3OU-736 »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #59
vayup wrote: post #34

Some of the stuff that was extracted from the unencrypted traffic in the link: - T-Mobile backhaul: Users' SMS, voice call contents and internet traffic content in plain text. - AT&T Mexico cellular backhaul: Raw user internet traffic - TelMex VOIP on satellite backhaul: Plaintext voice calls - U.S. military: SIP traffic exposing ship names - Mexico government and military: Unencrypted intra-government traffic - Walm…

> This is insane! Not as insane as it was in the early 2000s… > while link-layer encryption has been standard practice in satellite TV for decades Before Snowden, I would say 99% of ALL TCP traffic I saw on satellites was in unadulterated plain-text. Web and email mostly. … the pipe was so fast, you could only pcap if you had a SCSI hard drive!

```… the pipe was so fast, you could only pcap if you had a SCSI hard drive!```

This is why NSA asked for (and got from SGI) a guranteed rate I/O API - to make sure that whstever the signal intelkigence platform sensors captured could be written to storage.

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#84

Post by petercooper »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #59
vayup wrote: post #34

Some of the stuff that was extracted from the unencrypted traffic in the link: - T-Mobile backhaul: Users' SMS, voice call contents and internet traffic content in plain text. - AT&T Mexico cellular backhaul: Raw user internet traffic - TelMex VOIP on satellite backhaul: Plaintext voice calls - U.S. military: SIP traffic exposing ship names - Mexico government and military: Unencrypted intra-government traffic - Walm…

> This is insane! Not as insane as it was in the early 2000s… > while link-layer encryption has been standard practice in satellite TV for decades Before Snowden, I would say 99% of ALL TCP traffic I saw on satellites was in unadulterated plain-text. Web and email mostly. … the pipe was so fast, you could only pcap if you had a SCSI hard drive!

I was exposed to some of this as a teenager due to a (now dead) family member being heavily into telecoms. You could receive and process POCSAG (the protocol used by paging systems) to pretty much read the entire stream of unencrypted, plain text pager messages going out over the wire. You could also reprogram a generic pager to receive pages for whatever number you liked. You could also transmit your own POCSAG and send any number a page (only within your transmission range).

SMS was also a bit like this in its early days and you could read them coming off the local cell (also true of calls at a certain time, but I didn't see much of this).

I just did a quick search and apparently many pagers in the UK are still running cleartext POCSAG! https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1asnchu/are_uk_page...

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#85

Post by slow_typist »

jnovacho wrote: post #82
OnACoffeeBreak wrote: post #80

From the Introduction: "Each satellite may carry traffic for dozens of independent networks through an array of on-board transponders, each covering a diameter of thousands of kilometers (at most a third of Earth’s surface)". Can someone help me understand the use of "diameter" in this sentence. I am guessing it refers to the satellite's signal coverage of the Earth's surface. If that's the case, wouldn't something l…

They mean the intersection between the cone produced by the satellite and "illuminated" surface. If the antenna beam is normal to the sphere, it will produce a disk which has an diameter.

This, and 1/3 of earth’s surface is the maximum you can see from geostationary orbit.

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#88

Post by tmjwid »

petercooper wrote: post #84
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is insane! Not as insane as it was in the early 2000s… > while link-layer encryption has been standard practice in satellite TV for decades Before Snowden, I would say 99% of ALL TCP traffic I saw on satellites was in unadulterated plain-text. Web and email mostly. … the pipe was so fast, you could only pcap if you had a SCSI hard drive!

I was exposed to some of this as a teenager due to a (now dead) family member being heavily into telecoms. You could receive and process POCSAG (the protocol used by paging systems) to pretty much read the entire stream of unencrypted, plain text pager messages going out over the wire. You could also reprogram a generic pager to receive pages for whatever number you liked. You could also transmit your own POCSAG and…

Yeah POCSAG is not encrypted here in the UK. You can still see all the emergency information from around the country unencrypted in realtime. They even broadcast the details of the emergency and a lot of times it's not nice. You do/did get some bird watching sightings though!

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#89

Post by sayamqazi »

necovek wrote: post #49
ozim wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fire people for stuff they didn’t maliciously introduced you will end up with no people to work with. Imagine jailing doctors for every patient that died you would be out of doctors quite soon.

The legal system already has sufficient cop-out: for anything that you should have been aware of, or would have been informed about. Eg. doctors do get sued and fired for malpractice, if they did something no other skilled doctor would reasonably do ("let's just use the instruments from the previous surgery").

Here are a bunch more things to make you even more scared.

- Oops! mistakenly left some instrument inside and sewed up the patient - Junior begging to do certain step of the surgery while the anesthesiologist asking them to just get a move on. - Administered a drug to a newborn baby which was supposed to be given to the mother. (My sister's colleague did this with no consequences)

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#90

Post by sayamqazi »

nkrisc wrote: post #67
ozim wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fire people for stuff they didn’t maliciously introduced you will end up with no people to work with. Imagine jailing doctors for every patient that died you would be out of doctors quite soon.

If the doctor is criminally negligent they could be jailed.

My sister knows a doctor who botched a surgery due to an argument with a junior who wanted to do some step of the surgery. The senior one was not having it at all and just threw the scalpel directly at him. Nothing happened to him because if we start firing doctors for this, we would be missing out on all the surgeries he did successfully.
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