James is here to talk about satellite hacking. Thanks for coming.
Hi everyone. I'm James. I work with the directorate for digital services which is part of the
Pentagon's new chief digital and AI office. I do all kinds of weird things there from
like rapid response software engineering to cyber security stuff to policy stuff depending
on what matters to the country on any given day. But today what I want to talk about has
been an interest of mine for a long time and that is satellite cyber security and in particular how
we protect the radio links we use to talk to satellites. In this talk, we'll kind of go over
why satellite cyber security is becoming so important. We'll look at the history of satellite
radio exploitation which has been going on for decades. We'll develop two new threat models,
one that looks at using radio attacks against rocket launchers,
and one that looks at using radio attacks to hijack other people's satellites and transmit
your own messages. And then we'll conclude by talking about how people like you in the
audience might contribute to future research in this area. So satellite cyber security
has been in the limelight lately. Many of you have probably heard of KASAT, which is
a satellite over Europe operated by the company Viasat. And in February, more or less concurrent
with Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
was a cyber attack on Viasat's network. It caused a disruption first in modems located
within Ukraine, but it quickly spread to thousands of modems across the continent of Europe
and affected not just those modems but the systems which rely on those modems. Most notably
about 5,000 wind turbines in Germany were disrupted and lost access to critical weather
and operational data for a pretty long time. Now, the Viasat attack was not a radio jamming
attack.
Like we'll be talking about today. But it does tell us some interesting stuff for kind
of positioning this talk and why space security is important. Viasat is a commercial space
company. They sell Internet services to governments but also to many civilians, many wind turbines,
many people who just need to browse the Internet. And we see how satellites with this inherently
dual use nature are becoming increasingly popular targets for adversaries both at war
time and in peace, and we see why that can be bad. It can affect people who
are unrelated to a conflict as kind of spillover collateral damage. And space security is
a domain where that spillover risk is very, very high, and so securing these systems
is very important. When you're in geostationary Earth orbit, you can't see the silly lines
that people draw on maps. You see a third of the Earth's surface at any given time.
And so when we think about how we protect satellites, simply passing a law in your country
that is like you're not allowed to hack satellites is meaningless. Because that satellite radio
signal is accessible from just across the border. A satellite in the Earth orbit will
cross over dozens of countries every single day. And so technical controls to make it
harder to attack these systems are really important to develop. One way to think about
how to protect the future of space missions is to take a look at the past. It turns out
satellite hacking has been going on for a very long time. I recently published a paper that
looks at about 100 different satellite cyber security incidents. And everyone from big
nation state players like the Soviet Union and the United States to individuals who just
wanted fame and notoriety have played the satellite hacking game. And one trend I picked
out is that overwhelmingly, people target the radio link for satellites. This makes
a lot of intuitive sense, right? Because satellites are often very custom, very bespoke pieces
of hardware. They work in kind of weird ways. And as an attacker, you may not know how the
space platform works. But radio waves follow some very basic
physical principles. There are only so many communication protocols used to transmit radio
signals. And so it's a very common target for attackers to hit satellites. In recent years,
we've seen an increase in attacks like the one with Fiasat targeting satellite ground stations.
Also makes a lot of sense. Satellite ground stations are becoming more like commercial
IT systems that are just plugged into antennas that talk to satellites. And so they're more
exploitable. My guess is that middle line, the satellite payload, so the thing in orbit,
will end up getting many more attacks this decade than in previous decades,
as those also become more commodity IT. But regardless, the bread and butter of space
hacking has been, and I think will continue to be, radio-based attacks.
The first radio-based attack I found was in the 1970s. There was a dispute between
the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union asserted that the U.S. was transmitting
what's basically propaganda into Soviet territory from U.S. satellites. And they said that they
had a sovereign right to jam these illegal radio signals on someone else's satellite.
They weren't the first country to assert or execute this right. There are many countries
who view satellite jamming as an acceptable form of information control. And it's a big
policy debate that's still happening today in terms of like when is it appropriate to
interfere with radio signals from satellites because they are those inherently internationally
visible objects. I think one of the biggest space security developments, though, wasn't
in the sphere of big nation states. It was actually an individual, a guy going by the
image to thousands of viewers of HBO satellite television one night. He was protesting
recent changes in HBO's subscriber model. And what's interesting about this attack
is that it was just a guy. He was a satellite radio enthusiast, but he certainly wasn't
a nation state. And he didn't just jam the radio signal. He actually hijacked it and
transmitted his own message. Within a matter of months, Congress had passed specific legislation
making this activity, interfering with satellite radio signals, unlawful. And that was a
felony punishable up to 25 years in prison. So, one, don't try this at home, kids. But,
two, I think it's really important to see how big of a move this was in terms of threat
modeling. From Captain Midnight to today, there are too many incidents to list. But
there are a couple ones that I think are worth highlighting. We see increased activity
from nonstate actor groups. So, for example, Falun Gong, which is kind of a religious and
protest movement in China, heavily persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party, hijacked a
satellite TV signal.
This is something that lots of nonstate actor groups do, whether they be terrorists sending
threats or activist movements trying to get a message out to an audience they otherwise
can't reach. We're seeing more nonstate activity in the space radio interference game.
On kind of the smaller scale of things, there was also a really interesting incident in
2009 where a number of Brazilian truckers were arrested for hijacking a U.S. military
satellite transponder.
And using it as basically a long-range cell service. So FleetSat 8 was a military-operated
satellite and these ham radio enthusiasts were basically using it to transmit messages
to each other across the Amazon. What's interesting here is that these individuals were not like
incredibly well-resourced hackers. They weren't like space people. Their primary job was trucker.
Their secondary enthusiasm was for ham radio and they were still able to engage in these
attacks. One final incident I think is worth mentioning
is that in 2018, Norway and Finland accused Russia of interfering with GPS signals during
some NATO war exercises from a base in the Arctic. And we'll talk about GPS interference
today. It's actually not that technically hard of an attack to pull off. But I think
what's interesting is that this was not a precursor to an invasion of Norway by Russia.
This was something done during a time of unpeace or relative peace just as a form of harassment.
And as we think about securing space assets, this idea that countries may mess with each
other during times of peace is particularly concerning and a good motivator for why we
need space cybersecurity now.
So how do these kinds of jamming attacks happen? What's the basic principle of interfering
with satellite radio signals? We start with an antenna. This is a piece of metal, it's
of a certain size and a certain shape and you apply electrical pulses to the antenna
and it generates an electromagnetic wave which is basically a thing in the universe that
emanates out from the antenna.
antenna. And that wave has a particular shape, a particular pattern in which it modulates.
And that pattern is dictated by how you apply those electrical pulses to the stick of metal
that is your antenna. Now, when you look at this electromagnetic wave on a receiving antenna,
you can apply some math to this shape. And you can basically convert the information that's
encoded in the stream back to the pulses that were used to generate it. And you can say, you know,
all of the pulses that fall into this quadrant of the graph are the number one. All the ones that
fall into this quadrant of the graph are the number zero. And that's the core idea of digital
signal processing. It's taking something physical in the world and converting it into kind of a
symbol space that can be used to communicate information between computers. Now, when a
jammer gets involved, what ends up happening is this math operates not just on the legitimate
wave that's being sent, but kind of a summation of both the legitimate wave plus an
illegitimate wave on a very similar frequency. And so when you sum these waves together and
they're carrying different messages, you no longer have that nice, neat constellation of symbols that
map to specific sections on a graph. So now you don't know what's a zero and what's a one.
Your information is corrupted and it can no longer be received. And this is just a physical fact of
the way radios work, so it's very hard to get around. Even more interestingly, if our attacker
has a lot of power, if their jammer is really, really strong, they can actually engage in a
hijacking attack.
When you add their malicious signal to the very weak legitimate signal, the legitimate
signal is basically background noise. And you end up with a nice, neat constellation again,
but with the wrong information. So this is how something like the Captain Midnight attack is
possible. So what's special about satellites in the context of radio jamming? What makes it a
particularly interesting area to think about jamming attacks? I think one of the most important
numbers in satellite radio communications is something called free space path loss.
And it's expressed by this formula here. It's basically how much weaker a radio signal gets
the further away from a transmitter you are. And you don't have to worry about the numbers,
but it's a square of the distance is the important thing. So every step further from
the antenna you go, the signal gets much, much weaker. This makes sense if you kind of think
of a radio wave as a sphere that emanates out from an antenna. And the surface area of that
sphere will have the same amount of energy on it. But as the sphere gets further and further away, it
inflates like a balloon and eventually dissipates into the universe. And so as the balloon inflates,
you get less and less energy hitting your antenna and that drops off really dramatically.
So this concept of free space path loss is why attacks like this are possible. So this is a news
article from 2016 when Pokemon Go was really popular about people who were using software
defined radios to spoof their GPS signals and cheat at the game and appear in different continents.
07 00R
And if you aren't super familiar with radio jamming, this might not make any sense to
you, right?
Like, a GPS satellite is a billion-dollar government project.
It's got to have a great, powerful, really high-end transmitter.
Software-defined radio is like 200 bucks off the shelf.
So how can you win out?
And if we plug in the numbers to that free space path loss equation, we can start to
see why.
So the signal that comes from a GPS satellite is really weak by the time it travels all
20,000 kilometers from MEO to the Earth's surface to the antenna on your cell phone.
Meanwhile, the signal that comes from a relatively weak transmitter on your lab bench is still
much stronger because it doesn't have that massive amount of time to be losing power
to free space path loss.
And that's the crux of a GPS interference attack.
You take advantage of physical proximity in order to be able to override GPS signals.
If you have the right protocols, you can even spoof them.
But fundamentally, it's just about sharing.
It's not shouting the loudest.
So we've talked a little bit about GPS interference, but let's spice it up a little and think about
GPS interference attacks in a different domain.
So specifically, GPS interference attacks in space and looking at kind of specifically
rocket launches and what happens if a rocket doesn't know where it is because of GPS interference.
So this image here is from the European Space Agency's Vega mission, which is a fairly typical
rocket launch.
But it does have one interesting thing, which is that it's not launching just one satellite.
There are dozens of satellites that are sharing the cost of this ride to space.
And they come from entities who don't necessarily know each other or trust each other or have
any relationship prior to the launch.
This particular mission carried everything from an asset belonging to a Russian nuclear
physics institute to an Israeli tech startup to the Air Force of Thailand on a shared journey
towards the stars.
And in our threat model today.
Today we're going to imagine that one of these entities is malicious.
They put a CubeSat, a small satellite, onto this rocket that is designed to try to disrupt
the mission by causing GPS interference that makes the rocket not know where it is.
Now turns out you can't just walk up to Elon Musk with a block of C4 and say please attach
this to your rocket, I promise I won't blow it up.
There are safety controls on rocket launches that try to make CubeSats and secondary payloads
not threaten the overall mission.
In the U.S., the dominating documents for this are something called the CubeSat design
specification, which dictates how CubeSats and small satellites should look and behave,
and the Air Force space manual, which dictates how rocket launchers should behave and how
secondary payloads should keep them safe.
And if we dig into these documents, the situation looks quite grim for our attacker, our radio
jammer.
There are all kinds of very sensible rules that get in the way of radio jamming, stuff
like CubeSats.
CubeSats aren't allowed to turn on while they're attached to the launch vehicle.
They have to have these little switches that are pressed down and keep them turned off.
Or when you separate from the launch vehicle, you have to wait 45 minutes in low Earth orbit
before you can start transmitting radio signals.
But what's interesting about these rules, if we delve into them, is that the way they're
enforced is often just a matter of paperwork.
Nobody is checking each other's CubeSats to be sure they comply.
The person who built the CubeSat either contracts out or conducts themselves a day in the life
test, where they kind of pretend the launch is happening and record what occurred, and
they sign a form saying that the CubeSat behaves like it's supposed to.
This works great when everyone shares the same goals of having a safe rocket launch,
but it doesn't necessarily hold up quite so well when someone is either deceptive or
deceived in how their CubeSat behaves, if it behaves like differently on orbit.
So what we're going to do today is try to break some of these rules and then see how
far a notional CubeSat, a very small, inexpensive satellite, can go.
And we're going to see how far a notional CubeSat can get in terms of GPS interference
in low Earth orbit, so after the rocket has launched.
During the launch period, our CubeSat is going to behave just like it's supposed to.
It's going to be turned off.
It's going to look like a fairly regular CubeSat.
It's not going to do anything while we're attached to the rocket.
But the moment we separate from the launch vehicle, so when we're in orbit, we're going
to start misbehaving.
We're going to start to transmit radio signals 45 minutes before we're supposed to, and these
radio signals are going to be designed to overlap.
So they're going to target the specific frequency that comes from GPS satellites.
Now why would someone want to do this sort of thing?
It turns out rockets are super dangerous, and if they stray from their flight path,
you can either hurt a lot of people on the ground or accidentally start World War III.
And so there are very low tolerances for rockets that misbehave.
Traditionally, there's actually a guy on the ground called a range safety officer who has
a big red button.
And if the rocket's telemetry says that it's going on, it's going to be a big red button.
And if it's going off of its path, they can press that button and trigger what's called
a flight termination sequence.
The rocket will self-destruct, the goal being to burn up before it hits the ground.
Now what's changing these days is we're starting to move towards these devices called AFTSs,
autonomous flight termination systems.
And they use sensor data from the launch vehicle, specifically GPS inputs and accelerometer
data in order to make that fly, no-fly decision in real time.
And they can trigger a flight termination without a human intervention.
In the loop.
This is really, really great if you lose communications with your rocket and still need to terminate
the mission.
But it means that if you can't trust the sensor data coming into your AFTS because it might
be vulnerable to an attack, then there are all kinds of risks to the overall safety of
the mission.
So in order to understand if a CubeSat could mess with this sensor data, we have to model
a couple of things.
First, we have to model the motion of the CubeSat.
So I did this using an astrodynamics tool called FreeFlyer.
And it turns out it's a very low tech.
You basically have these tubes called P-pods which are attached to the launch vehicle.
They have a spring on one end and a door on the other.
And at some point in the mission, the door opens and the spring just kind of gently eats
the CubeSat out into space.
And it just drifts away from the rocket at a fairly low speed.
Which means that you've got this really long window of time when you've got a proximity
advantage.
You've got that free space path loss advantage and you're kind of hanging out close to the
rocket.
If we take those numbers and then plug them in.
To some basic models like free space path loss, how strong we'd expect a radio signal
to be from an antenna on the CubeSat, we can get a sense of what a jammer might theoretically
be able to get into an antenna on the rocket that it's separated from.
And so that's what I did here.
You've got this dotted line at the top, which is what the GPS signal would be if there was
no interference going on.
And then the curved lines, the further down the graph they are, the more disruption there
is to GPS communications.
If we map these models from the simulation to the characteristics of high-end GPS receivers
today, we can get a sense of what this means.
So the green zone is where the GPS reception would be basically perfect.
You wouldn't have any dilution or precision.
You'd know where the rocket was.
The yellow zone is where you start to have issues.
And then the red zone is where you have serious degradation in GPS performance and may not
be able to determine the location of the rocket.
Now this isn't to say that, like, it's easy to launch a CubeSat.
I think there's a lot of operational challenges in actually doing that.
But I think it is worth highlighting that the radio environment, even when you're thinking
about assets that are in space, is not necessarily a safe or trusted environment.
Radio waves are inherently public physical phenomenon.
And so when you design your space missions or when you think about space hardware or
rocket design, you need to keep in mind that you can't necessarily trust radio data at
face value or trust that it will be there for you when you need it.
So this is an example of an attack where we mess with a signal that is coming from space
to something close to the ground.
But there's a different way to look at space jamming, which is to flip things around and
look at signal hijacking attacks.
So attacks like the Captain Midnight incident.
These are scenarios where you want to get a broadcast satellite in orbit to transmit
your message instead of the message that it's supposed to be transmitting for its
owner.
To understand these kinds of signal hijacking attacks.
It's good to have a basic understanding of how broadcast satellites work.
And this applies to most broadcast satellites.
There's a bit of a shift towards more complicated devices, but most of them work like this still.
You've got a ground station, which could be something that's physically constructed,
a big antenna on a rooftop, or it could be like a van, like the sort of van you see following
a news crew.
And you point the dish on that ground station up at a satellite in orbit and transmit a
message on a specific radio frequency towards a device on the satellite.
Which is called a transponder.
And transponders are basically these like analog antenna setups.
And they'll receive a frequency on one signal or they'll receive a signal on a specific
frequency and then they'll take that signal and send it out again on a different frequency
down to the customer.
So it will be over a really wide area underneath that satellite and picking up the message
that's being sent.
Now the important thing to know about these transponders is that they are very, very dumb.
Satellites are expensive.
You don't want them to break.
And many of these are basically analog devices.
If you send a message on the right frequency to a transponder in the right spot in orbit,
it will dutifully relay that like a bent pipe.
It just takes whatever comes in and sends whatever comes out.
Now, many of you have probably figured out where this is going, right?
If you are an attacker and you can send a sufficiently strong signal into that pipe,
what comes out the other side will be a signal.
It will be a combination of your very, very strong signal and the legitimate transmitter's
relatively weak signal and you will be able to take over the message and send the broadcast
that you want.
So what does enough power look like in this kind of situation?
I've gone ahead and put together a little web tool that you all can actually play with
after the conference.
There will be a link at the end of the slides to model these sorts of scenarios and see
kind of how power interacts with geography in space.
So we've gotten our model here.
We have an attacker antenna and a defender antenna.
We can control the power levels of both antennas and their position and then we can set up
our simulations so we can pick a specific satellite and see how much power the two antennas
could get up to that device.
So I'm going to look at Viasat 2 first.
This is a satellite in geostationary earth orbit.
So it's 30,000 kilometers away and doesn't move relative to the earth's surface.
From way up here, the attacker and defender ground station are basically the same distance.
So the attacker will need a jammer that is basically as strong as a legitimate transmitter
in order to overwhelm that signal and take over.
And that makes sense, right?
When you're really far away, the distances on the earth's surface don't matter quite
as much as just the raw power that you can pump into a signal.
If we take a look at closer satellites, though, those in low earth orbit, things start to
get a little bit more interesting.
So I'm going to pull up a low earth orbiting satellite here called Aqua.
This is an earth observation satellite.
So it loops around the earth every day taking pictures for scientific research and stuff.
And we'll go ahead and look at how geography can affect jamming potential in the context
of low earth orbit.
So I've set Aqua to kind of crest over the horizon here into the northern hemisphere.
We're going to take our attacker and we'll go ahead and move them up to Michigan.
So they're in a very different spot from the defender.
And then we'll wait a few seconds as Aqua starts to kind of go over the horizon and
make contact with the defender.
And it's going to attempt to walk right over the ground station.
And at some point it'll come in range of the defender and the defender will be able to
start transmitting legitimate radio signals to Aqua.
So I've got the attacker jammer is very low now.
We've got regular communications right now.
And then as we turn up the jammer, we can see that at a relatively low level of jamming
power, the attacker is able to take advantage of this geographic positioning to overwhelm
the legitimate signal.
This is true for every satellite in low earth orbit.
The very nature of low-earth orbit means there will always be a point in time and a point in space where an attacker can have a very fundamental geographic advantage for jamming.
The attacker can always build a cheaper jammer than a defender.
Now, as the satellite crests the horizon and moves away from the attacker's line of sight, they will get weaker and weaker, and the defender will regain their communications advantage.
But I think it's at least interesting to note how the geography of low-earth orbit in particular creates these interesting opportunities for jamming attacks.
This tool is open source. You all can play around with it. It's built on some really neat JavaScript libraries.
You can model all kinds of different satellites and time periods. You can look at orbits over multiple weeks, or you can pick other objects like the space station, for example, or a Starlink satellite.
And just get an intuitive feel for how geography interacts with when jammers can talk to satellites and how strong they need to be.
And that's part of the equation, is the power side. But there's also the protocol side, right?
You need to be sure.
The message that you're sending over this bent pipe is meaningful to the receivers on the other side.
So I've also put together a model in GNU Radio using flow graphs that can actually let you walk through the process of generating these signals.
And this is in the same Git repository that will be at the end of the slide deck.
And these are two flow graphs here. They're using an awesome out-of-tree module for DVBS2, digital video broadcasting for satellite, which is a common protocol for satellite radio communications.
The top flow graph is the one that's on the left.
The bottom flow graph is the legitimate transmitter.
The bottom flow graph is the illegitimate one.
They're both basically the same, except the message inside is different.
They're transmitting different content.
And then I've got this receiver model here.
So we basically combine the signal from the two transmitters.
We add them together in order to simulate that interference environment.
And then we pass it to a DVBS2 demodulator and receiver and convert that back into a video feed.
You could take these flow graphs and apply them to real-world hardware.
But for simulations, it's really nice to just be able to do it all on a computer.
So in the model here, we can have the jammer at no jamming.
And then we can look at the constellation diagram that we've got.
And we'll see those four nice, neat dots that we would expect from this particular encoding scheme.
So this means there's no jamming. There's no disruption.
The signal's coming through as we want it to.
If we turn on the jammer just a little bit, make it roughly equal to the legitimate signal, we'll see that constellation has degraded.
We no longer have those four symbols.
We can't tell what's a one, what's a zero.
And the information we're transmitting has been broken at a physical level.
If we ramp the jammer all the way up, and then we look again at the constellation diagram,
we'll see those four nice, neat dots again.
But the idea here is that it's probably transmitting the wrong content.
It's transmitting the attacker's content.
So we can actually take a look at what this looks like on the receiver side.
Someone who has their satellite dish pointed at this jammed environment.
So I'm going to run three simulations.
The first one is with no jamming.
So we'll kick that off.
We'll set the jammer to zero.
And we'll look at the constellation here.
And it's going to be that nice, neat, orderly constellation that we would expect from an undisturbed satellite signal.
Next, we'll go ahead and kick off a medium jamming scenario.
So this is where the jammer and the transmitter will have equal levels of power.
And if we look at the constellation, it will be that degraded, kind of meaningless constellation.
And we would assume that the receiver's going to get no jamming.
No useful data out of it.
And then finally, I'll kick off a third scenario here with a hijacking attempt.
So we're going to transmit the strongest signal we can.
And all three of these scenarios are saving the output to some files on my machine
that we'll be able to look at and actually parse out the signal that's coming through them.
So this last one here, we're going to ramp that jammer way up.
And then take a look at the constellation.
And we'll see the constellation is nice and neat like we'd expect.
But hopefully it's carrying the wrong message.
So now we're going to run the jammer.
And now I'm going to pop open a tool called tsduck,
which is a really awesome open source tool for working with MPEG transport streams,
which are commonly used by satellite TV and data providers.
And we'll go ahead and look at these signals,
and we'll try to pipe them to a video player and see what's going on.
So I'll first take a look at the scenario with no jamming.
And pipe the output of that process to VLC.
And we'll see the legitimate video play here.
So after a few seconds, we'll see this is some public domain footage
from the International Space Station.
It's undisturbed.
This is the video that we would expect to be sending.
Going through that whole simulated radio pipeline and coming out like this.
The next scenario we're going to look at is where the jammer has equal power to the transmitter.
So I'm going to go ahead and run that now.
And what we'll see is before we turn on the jammer,
we'll actually get a little bit of our legitimate video.
And then once the jammer comes on, we'll start to see a bunch of error messages
as it's no longer able to decode that video feed and eventually gives up.
So this is where we've canceled the signal.
Then we'll look at the hijacking scenario.
And again, we should expect to see a little bit of the legitimate feed when it comes up.
But then pretty much instantaneously, the attacker signal is going to take over
and it's going to transmit a malicious message.
And the attacker has now hijacked it and they're able to transmit their own video
to the people who are listening to this satellite feed.
And that's the crux of satellite signal hijacking.
If you shout loud enough and in the right way, people will have no choice but to hear you.
And it's a very fundamental attack that's based off of kind of the physical way
these satellites operate and the way radio waves work.
So where do we go from here?
What's kind of the next thing to think about in terms of satellite jamming attacks?
The attacks that we talk about today are very fundamental, right?
They're just a matter of screaming really, really loud.
They're the most basic ideas of jamming applied maybe to a novel environment space.
But there's nothing too weird going on here.
That said, there's a lot of research to be done in how you can effectively mess with satellites
or other radio signals with less power.
So there are sophisticated jamming techniques that involve sending pulses at specific intervals
or using a weaker transmitter that sends very specifically crafted messages
in order to mess with the receiving end.
And I think people here are really interested in RF jamming attacks,
spending some time thinking about what sort of sophisticated attacks can be conducted
against these DVBSed satellites.
Satellite broadcasts could be a really fruitful area for research
and finding exploits against some space systems.
On the defending side, on the side of protecting these assets,
there are all kinds of unsolved questions.
So there are ways we can deal with jamming.
One of the most common techniques is basically frequency hopping.
You shift frequencies according to some pre-agreed pattern,
and the jammer doesn't know which frequency to jam next,
so they're always one step behind you, and you can transmit your message.
There are all kinds of problems with setting up that pre-agreed pattern.
That makes it difficult.
And also frequency hopping maybe doesn't work in cases where the satellite
is already in orbit and doesn't support that kind of behavior.
So there are some questions to think about how we can upgrade our existing satellites
to maybe make those bent pipes more reliable.
Is there something we can install on ground stations like the customer terminals
to detect pirated broadcasts using cryptography?
Is there some way we can upgrade our in-orbit satellites
with these very dumb mechanical transponders in order to make sure that
we can make them more capable of detecting and preventing these attacks?
So if you're really interested in hardware design type stuff around radios,
I think this is a fruitful area to dive into.
There's also the detection and forensic side.
And this matters quite a lot because satellite dishes are super directional.
When you point a dish at the sky, the beam doesn't spread very far.
The side lobes from your antenna don't go very far from your transmitter.
And so if a satellite is being jammed, it can be really hard to figure out
who's jamming it and where they are.
So you can arrest them or disrupt the jamming.
And so thinking about how we might forensically detect satellite jammers
and locate them and how we might increase the attribution
to satellite jamming attacks, I think there's a really high risk
that people will think they can get away with satellite radio interference
without being detected.
And I think there's a good chance those people are right in the status quo.
And coming up with ways to make nation states face diplomatic costs
for engaging in jamming attacks or make individuals face criminal risk
when they do it can be one way to really protect these systems
by just deterring attackers before they even get to the stage
of messing with the satellites.
And that kind of ties into the last theme here, which is talking about
the policy and norms that we want to have for space cybersecurity and space jamming.
I started this talk by talking about how the Soviet Union and the United States
got into a fight in the United Nations about what kind of jamming countries
are allowed to do.
And these discussions are happening all the time.
Questions about what acceptable behavior looks like when we're talking about
treating the space environment and the radio environment.
And what the red lines are.
What countries and individuals and businesses are allowed to do in this space.
So if you have policy chops, legal chops, lobbying chops,
it's a place to apply that to and kind of think about how we set the norms
for the next generation of space missions.
So if I were to pick three key takeaways from this talk,
I think the first is the physicality of space.
Satellites are dictated by their environment in a way that very few other
information systems are designed.
Satellites are constantly under attack from the sun, from temperatures,
from radiation.
And so when you build satellites, you make adaptations to deal with this
incredibly hostile environment of outer space.
And those adaptations, like having very, very dumb transponders that are super
reliable in that hostile environment,
can lead to cybersecurity risks.
And so as security researchers who are trying to find, like, new and weird
exploits in space assets, I think starting with the physics and kind of the
physicality of space assets is a really great way to mine out interesting
ideas for space exploitation.
It's also worth noting that there's nothing new about space cybersecurity.
People have been doing it for decades.
And looking at some of these hacker heroes of the past and learning from the
discoveries they made can be a really great way to think about how we can
protect systems in the future.
The space world is changing a lot right now.
We are launching orders of magnitude more satellites every year than we ever
have before.
Thousands of satellites will go up in orbit this year and next year and the
year after.
And the design decisions we make in building these satellites today will end
up shaping what security looks like in space for decades to come.
So people like you all in the audience who care about cybersecurity, who care
cybersecurity, who already know that it's something that matters for space assets, can
have a really important voice in shaping this next generation of space missions, whether
that's coming to conferences like DEF CON, going to things like the aerospace village,
or working in the space industry, or committing to open source projects, or doing your own
security research, the next five years are probably some of the most important times
for space cybersecurity, maybe ever.
It's a really big moment for what space looks like for people, and being someone to jump
on that now is, I think, a really important thing to do.
There's a need for people.
There's someone in this audience who's better at radios than me, who's better at astrodynamics
than me, and getting your voices in this discussion can go a long way towards making everyone
who depends on space a bit safer.
So that's basically it for me.
There's a little bit of time for questions.
I think if you want to shoot me an e-mail afterwards, you can also do that.
All of the resources from this talk, so like that little web demo, the new radio, the
flow graphs, all of that are available at this Git repository, so you can check that
out.
If you're interested in jobs, I can think of few places that need an injection of DEF CON
as badly as the Department of Defense.
We work on really cool and weird systems at DDS.
Hit me up if that excites you.
Be happy to connect you with people.
And then check out the other space stuff.
There's a really cool talk on Saturday on hijacking old, like, retired satellite that will take
some of these principles I've done through simulations and actually make them real.
And then there's tons of cool content.
I'm going to stop talking now.
Happy to hear any questions and hopefully you all enjoyed the brief.