Russia 'intercepts Europe's key satellites' | Hacker News Reader

Russia 'intercepts Europe's key satellites'

news.satnews.com

64 pointscal8528 comments

The real headline here is “Anyone can control Europe’s key satellites because they didn’t bother to put encryption on billions of dollars worth of critical infrastructure”

US satellites are the same

phones and their baseband radios too :)

and their wifi radios and Bluetooth radios and touchscreen controllers using TEMPEST

Yes!!

“Sensitive” satellites have unencrypted command channels?!?!

Even with narrow transmission angle that seems like a bold strategy

Encoding sensitive message is a thing since dark ages

Yes, this is pretty standard, even in military contexts.

For example, military aircraft ACARS communications are often entirely in plaintext, and don't forget the famous "Predator drone video feed intercepted via $26 software" incident: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB126102247889095011

However, that's only the data they forward, and this can be more or less trivially fixed at several layers, since many of these communication satellites are just "bent pipes" that often don't even digitally demodulate what they receive before frequency-shifting and rebroadcasting it.

Authentication is a bit more challenging; interesting things can happen even when traffic itself is encrypted, such as Brazilean truckers using your expensive military communications satellite as a football chat room: https://www.wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/

Beyond payload encryption/authentication, satellite operational commands (e.g. engine and inertia wheel control, power management etc.) should have been encrypted for decades, though (and are one of the few explicitly carved out exemptions to otherwise strict "no encryption on amateur radio bands" regulations), so these claims about "software kill commands" seems very worrying.

During the Falklands War some of the UK's European allies intercepted transmissions from Soviet spy satellites that allowed the location of the Argentinian fleet to be identified - this information was passed to the UK.

Is this true or is this the way the US passed intel to the UK against their nominal ally?

Here is one reference: https://www.facebook.com/groups/749749943166663/posts/126838...

I have seem other references.

That's clever. Normally you can't intercept satellite uplinks because they're pointed at the satellite. But if you have your own, highly manoeuvrable satellite...

Russia is a terrorist state. Nothing more, nothing less.

TBF, Russia does have something more. It is a terrorist state with a gas station

Venezuela has more oil than Russia and yet it's irrelevant because the US actually enforces sanctions against Venezuela.

Venezuela does not have the capacity to extract that much oil and it is also quite expensive.

USA violated Venezuelan sovereignty. USA is a terrorist state.

> gaz*

More so than the US?

So is [insert list of commonly recognized nations].

What's your point?

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