Independent researchers and The United States military has become increasingly focused on orbiting satellites’ potential security holes In recent years. These devices, built primarily with durability, reliability and longevity in mind, are largely never intended to be extremely safe. But at the ShmooCon security conference in Washington, DC on Friday, embedded device security researcher Karl Koscher raised the question of another stage in a satellite’s life cycle: What happens when a satellite The old one stopped working and switched to a “graveyard orbit”?
Koscher and his colleagues received permission last year to access and broadcast from a Canadian satellite called Anik F1R, launched to support Canadian broadcasters in 2005 and designed for 15 years of use. The satellite’s coverage extends below the southern border of the United States and into Hawaii and the easternmost part of Russia. The satellite will soon move to its graveyard orbit, and nearly all other services that use it have been moved to a new satellite. But while the Anik F1R still had the uplink license and transponder colocation, Koscher had the opportunity to take over and broadcast to the northern hemisphere.
“My favorite thing is actually seeing it in action!” Koscher told WIRED. “It’s a fantasy to go from creating a video stream to having it broadcast across all of North America.”
Koscher and colleagues from telecommunications and embedded device attack group Shadytel broadcast a live stream from another security conference, ToorCon San Diego, in October. At ShmooCon last week, he explained the technologies. instrument they used to turn an unidentified commercial uplink facility (a station with a specially powered dish for communicating with satellites) into a command center for broadcasting from satellites.
In this case, the researchers were allowed to access both the uplink and satellite facilities, but the test highlights the interesting gray area when a defunct satellite is not in use but has yet to move. from Earth to its final resting orbit.
“Technically, there are no controls on this or most satellites — if you can generate a strong enough signal to get there, the satellite will send it back to Earth,” explains Koscher. prefer. “People will need a large dish and a powerful amplifier and knowledge of what they are doing. And if a satellite is to be fully utilized, they will need to overpower anyone else using that particular transponder point or frequency. “
In other words, whoever shouts loudest into the microphone (geo-asynchronous orbit) will get the most amplification of their voice, but it will be difficult to overpower the broadcasting giants – though not must be unprecedented. For example, in 1986, a hacker claiming to be Captain Midnight hack into an HBO broadcast belong to The Falcon and the Snowman by stealing the satellite signal of the Galaxy 1.
Recently, hackers have been taking advantage of unused satellites for their own purposes. In 2009, the Brazilian Federal Police arrested 39 suspects on suspicion of US Navy satellite hijacking use high power antennas and other special equipment for their own CB (citizen band) short distance radio communication.
