Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 145 posts

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

#91

Post by ptero »

anilakar wrote: post #81
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That seldom works. Simple repeaters transmit the strongest signal they get and can be easily hijacked by a rogue ground transmitter. This is the main reason simple repeaters on orbit went out of fashion in the 1980s.

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

#92

Post by lxgr »

anilakar wrote: post #81
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Really depends on what the satellite does, and even for purely "dumb pipe" satellites you'll need some telemetry for stationkeeping, repositioning etc.

Practically, you'll also want to be able to reconfigure spot beam to backhaul mappings or even cross-connect some spot beams to cut satphone-to-satphone voice latency in half etc.

That's not even considering constellations like Iridium that do actual packet switching in space.

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

#93

Post by Thorrez »

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).

The only thing I can think of is maybe the satellite company runs compression on the data. Encryption would prevent that.

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

#94

Post by BertoldVdb »

metalman wrote: post #79

I think that the risk of anybody achiving a malicious outcome by accessingn these data streams is as spectacularly low as the effort required to get the signal and then figure out some context to the randomised transmissions and then weaponise that is high, very high. Presumably it is GB/sec by however many channels, 99% of it will dry your eyeballs out and quickly render even the most determined spook a quaking quiv…

A lot of low population density cellular backhaul runs over satellite. Two factor SMS or voice can be directly intercepted, assuming encryption is not used.

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

#95

Post by GuB-42 »

stephen_g wrote: post #45
vasco wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was only successful because Google said you'd rank higher if you did it.

Which in-turn was driven by the Snowden revelations of what the NSA was doing in terms of mass surveillance.

I have a more cynical view of the reason.

It is to protect commercial interests, I don't think that Google cares about the NSA looking at your personal data.

Google cares a lot about protecting the personal data they get from you, so that they and no one else can get it, at least not for free.

Because let's get real, 99% of the time, why do you need encryption? The reason is commercial activity. It is really important to protect your credit card number, otherwise no one would trust e-commerce. For paid service to work, you need to authenticate, and it means encryption, no paywall means no authentication and much less need for encryption. And even with "free" services, you need encryption to protect the account that shouldn't even be required in the first place. As for general communication, my guess is that hackers and governments alike are more interested in financial data than in casual conversation.

So by pushing TLS everywhere, Google is actually pushing for a more commercial, less open web. That it helps with general privacy (except against Google itself) is just a happy accident.

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

#96

Post by lxgr »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #52
mjevans wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Space need to decrypt a vast majority of the traffic? Flow can be just as brick not-smart as fiber optic cables under the sea. Now, management, control, etc? Yeah those you need to decode in orbit.

> Flow can be just as brick not-smart as fiber optic cables under the sea Wouldn't this still leak metadata for routing?

Depending on the spot beam size, the only thing you'd always learn is the ground station's rough geographic location.

Anything else could be masked by metadata encryption, rotating lower layer identifiers, and cover traffic. Not sure if any actual protocols do that though.

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

#97

Post by lxgr »

fransje26 wrote: post #64
astrange wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encryption is basically free as far as I know, but it is more complex and it must be hard to get software updates up there.

Here is their excuse: > Panasonic told us that enabling encryption could incur a 20–30% capacity loss. In addition, when using IPsec, ESP and IP headers can introduce 20–30 bytes of overhead, which is nontrivial for small-packet applications like VoIP and video calls

> Panasonic told us that enabling encryption could incur a 20–30% capacity loss.

Wow, I guess they're still betting on customers sending tons of redundant data up/down that they can shave off via compression? That's such a 90s modem thing to do. ("Faster than 56 kbit/s!!")

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

#98

Post by nkrisc »

ozim wrote: post #73
nkrisc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the doctor is criminally negligent they could be jailed.

That's kind of obvious, I didn't think it has to be spelled out.

My point is that something doesn’t have to be malicious to be criminally negligent, if the law says so. I’m suggesting that some of the security breaches we’ve seen ought to have been criminally negligent. Perhaps they weren’t under existing law, but I think they ought to be.

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

#99

Post by lxgr »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #31
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is almost free on modern CPUs that have hardware acceleration, yea

Wireguard uses ChaCha20, which to my knowledge neither has nor requires HW acceleration to be fast.

It's faster on CPUs without dedicated hardware than AES, but that doesn't mean that it's faster than fixed-function AES hardware.

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

#100

Post by fragmede »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #31
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is almost free on modern CPUs that have hardware acceleration, yea

Wireguard uses ChaCha20, which to my knowledge neither has nor requires HW acceleration to be fast.

> However, the software performance [of wireguard] is far below the speed of wire.

https://github.com/chili-chips-ba/wireguard-fpga

Post reply on HN