Hacking in the older "using a device in an unexpected/unsupported way," not "black-hat hacking" I guess. Typical over-dramatic Wired. Hats off to this guy, hardware hacks always impress.
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The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
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Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#172It shouldn't count as a vulnerability that you can get root of a device that you have physical possession of. If there's any real vulnerability here, it's that having root of your terminal gives you any extra privileges to the rest of the network.
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Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#173This is like saying if someone can get close to your house with a hammer they can mount a hammer attack on your windows and bypass your homes security. lmao, what a load of bullshit.
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Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#174Planet Labs really missed the boat here. Could've easily beat SpaceX
To what? Planet Labs have a handful of LEO imaging sats, some of which SpaceX has launched. They can't afford to launch a LEO internet constellation.
Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#175Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#176This reads to me like the (more complicated but ultimately) equivalent of "a user reverse engineers the website's javascript!". As in, this allows the user to mod their client but it doesn't change anything for anyone else, and wasn't meant as a real secure element. I'd assume that getting root access to the user terminal gives them no additional privileges to access the actual Starlink data & control planes.
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Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#177Remember 20+ years ago when people did this with cable modems?
And remember how the cable companies completely fixed it? Starlink already seems to do the right thing to prevent cloning and unauthorized access. Secure chip (STSAFE) and mTLS for talking to internal services. Maybe researchers will find some bugs in their services but they will be patched quickly.
Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you root your ISP provided modem, aren’t you one step closer to exploiting some bug in DOCSIS? Similarly here wouldn’t you be one step closer to exploiting the “network itself?” (Air-quotes because I’m not actually sure what that means in this context.)
If you root your Android, are you one step closer to hacking the 5G network?
If you root the baseband processor, yes.
Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Locking down user terminals is one part of starlink security. Breaking that is a huge accomplishment. It appears that the other layers still prevent this from being a full blown attack, but that may just be a matter of time.
What makes you think this is true? I'm not shocked they did lock it down, but why do you think it's important to the security?
They are using a layered model. Giving an attacker access to communicate directly with your satellites and send specially crafted packets is giving them a really useful tool.
Re: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Uh, why though? This demonstrates that a determined attacker can get access to the software running on their own personal terminal. That's like a determined attacker being able to get access to their own personal router. It sounds like strictly a good thing and with how many satellite internet companies are coming online we will hopefully see some common hardware devices that users have full access to along with some…
Where it would be problematic is if it's trivial to do this to someone else's terminal.