Speaker 1: Hi, it's Weskasova. We're taking a break this week, so
Speaker 1: here's one of our favorite episodes you might have missed
Speaker 1: and an update. Since this episode aired, the US is
Speaker 1: now trying some creative ways to defend satellites from hackers.
Speaker 1: In August, the US Air Force and US Space Force
Speaker 1: hosted a cash prize competition at the Defcon hacking conference.
Speaker 1: Teams tried to hack a live satellite in orbit for
Speaker 1: the first time. The winner was a team from Italy.
Speaker 2: I was able to see the sort of traffic people
Speaker 2: were sending over their satellite Internet connections, so stuff like
Speaker 2: text messages from people who were using in flight Wi
Speaker 2: Fi services, or things like passengers on cruise ships when
Speaker 2: they were making payments at point of sale systems. Also
Speaker 2: a lot of like passport numbers, really concerning data to
Speaker 2: be getting in clear text.
Speaker 1: From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. It's the big take. I'm
Speaker 1: west Kosova today. The latest target for hackers satellites. Thousands
Speaker 1: of satellites circling high above our heads make it possible
Speaker 1: to do many of the things we take for granted
Speaker 1: every day. When you send it text, find your way
Speaker 1: with Google Maps, use your credit card. Even check the
Speaker 1: time on your phone, Chances are some bit of your
Speaker 1: info was beamed up to a satellite from one place
Speaker 1: and beamed back down instantly to where it needed to go.
Speaker 1: The downside to this invisible miracle of technology, satellite systems
Speaker 1: aren't always as secure as they should be, and this
Speaker 1: means they can be easy targets forers looking to steal
Speaker 1: information for profit, or governments looking to steal secrets or
Speaker 1: cripple the communications systems of their rivals.
Speaker 3: What's so extraordinary is it seems that the Russians, if
Speaker 3: it were them, were prepared to take extraordinary risks because
Speaker 3: they were aiming for the Ukrainian military.
Speaker 1: That's my Bloomberg colleague Katrina Manson. She investigated a real
Speaker 1: life example of this, a mysterious satellite hack on the
Speaker 1: day Russia invaded Ukraine, and she joins me now to
Speaker 1: tell us what she found. Katrina, can you start by
Speaker 1: describing the satellite hack that happened in February of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, just a little over a year.
Speaker 3: Ago, as Vladimir Putin was saying he was launching a
Speaker 3: special military operation on Ukraine. Ukrainian military communication connections that
Speaker 3: rely on modems that link up to a satellite were
Speaker 3: going dead, and it turned out the like communications were
Speaker 3: going dead across Europe. These are all broadband Internet connections
Speaker 3: that rely on one single satellite, and it provides satellite
Speaker 3: connections to more than one hundred thousand users across Europe.
Speaker 3: But specifically, the thing that mattered so much to the
Speaker 3: Ukrainian military. So imagine military are often in frontline positions
Speaker 3: in remote locations where they can't get Internet the usual
Speaker 3: way you would through a static connection. This allows you
Speaker 3: to dial up essentially to connect to a satellite more
Speaker 3: than twenty thousand miles up in space, and that's how
Speaker 3: you get your Internet connection. And that's what went dead
Speaker 3: across Ukraine and Europe. Now, this satellite is owned by
Speaker 3: a company named Viasat, that's a US company based in California,
Speaker 3: so a continent away. Users who rely on that satellite,
Speaker 3: their connections started going dead.
Speaker 1: So when that happened, what actually was happening? Why were
Speaker 1: these connections going dead?
Speaker 3: After a lot of research and forensic analysis and all
Speaker 3: the things that people have to do to what's called
Speaker 3: reverse engineer a hack like this, and it turns out
Speaker 3: to have been a very complicated hack attackers breached what's
Speaker 3: called a VPN, a virtual private network that's an entry
Speaker 3: point into a network that is meant to be secured.
Speaker 3: It wasn't. There was what's called a misconfiguration. We don't
Speaker 3: have much more information about that. They got into the
Speaker 3: network and then they moved across the network again, another
Speaker 3: thing they shouldn't be able to do. There should be doors,
Speaker 3: as it were, fire doors preventing you from making the
Speaker 3: next move. They get to a network management server that's
Speaker 3: essentially something that controls the flow of information. They put
Speaker 3: in a malicious software toolkit that's basically the bad instruction,
Speaker 3: and then that bad instruction is sent to modems across
Speaker 3: Ukraine and Europe and it wipes the modems. It overwrites
Speaker 3: a part of the modem which is used for memory,
Speaker 3: and the modems are no longer operable, they can no
Speaker 3: longer make that connection to the satellite. The rest of
Speaker 3: the system get online. So essentially a piece of malware
Speaker 3: was distributed throughout the network and it fried the modems.
Speaker 3: It's a really extraordinary attack because people connect to the
Speaker 3: Internet through the satellite just via your home modem. That's
Speaker 3: the same thing that gets the Internet signal into your
Speaker 3: house and then it's often distributed through a router so
Speaker 3: you can connect via Wi Fi. That was the ultimate
Speaker 3: target of the attack. So more than forty five thousand
Speaker 3: modems that connected this satellite system effectively were wiped and
Speaker 3: when they were wiped, they couldn't make the connection.
Speaker 1: So they determined that this was a hack. Do they
Speaker 1: know who did the hacking?
Speaker 3: Well, interestingly, Viasat, the company that owned the satellite, and
Speaker 3: its partner, you tell Sat, that's a French company that
Speaker 3: ran the network in partnership with Viasat, have never said
Speaker 3: They have only ever said attackers. When I press them,
Speaker 3: they explain that they are quite cagy in order to
Speaker 3: preserve the network. What did happen is it fell to countries.
Speaker 3: It fell to the European Union, to the US, to
Speaker 3: the UK, Australia and Canada to blame Russia.
Speaker 1: On what basis did they blame Russia for being responsible
Speaker 1: for this attack?
Speaker 3: US intelligence spent something like four weeks looking into this attack.
Speaker 3: At the moment that the attack happened, Viasat told defense
Speaker 3: contractors and the US government through a specific way that
Speaker 3: they share information because that same satellite that provides your
Speaker 3: average Internet for users at home who just want to
Speaker 3: stream movies or just go on the Internet. That same
Speaker 3: satellite also provides sensitive government services. It's a different part
Speaker 3: of the satellite. But Viasat immediately informed its government partners,
Speaker 3: and the US launched an intelligence investigation into what had happened,
Speaker 3: So did intelligence services in France and the UK, and
Speaker 3: after four weeks US intelligence determined that the GRU were
Speaker 3: the attackers. The GRU is a Russian military intelligence unit
Speaker 3: that has acquired quite a reputation for hacking.
Speaker 1: Do they say with certainty that it was the Russians
Speaker 1: or they just suspected? How were they able to determine
Speaker 1: that it was actually the GRU.
Speaker 3: They haven't said much about that, and in fact, in
Speaker 3: the public attribution, I think it's only one country, Estonia,
Speaker 3: that has ever publicly labeled it as the GRU. So
Speaker 3: all of these assessments have stayed private. But the EU
Speaker 3: blamed clearly Russia. Others blamed Russian military hackers. So there's
Speaker 3: a range of public attribution, but the private work of
Speaker 3: the intelligence community is not something that anyone's made public.
Speaker 1: And I imagine that the Russians take exception to this conclusion.
Speaker 3: I did speak to the Russian embassy in Washington, DC,
Speaker 3: and the statement they sent me I think said, this
Speaker 3: is total nonsense.
Speaker 1: Internet users who were customers of this satellite had their
Speaker 1: Internet knocked out, but they weren't really the target of
Speaker 1: this hack, is there, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: What's so extraordinary is it seems that the Russians, if
Speaker 3: it were them, were prepared to take extraordinary risks because
Speaker 3: they were aiming for the Ukrainian military communications and that's
Speaker 3: what was knocked out. But there was what's called overspill.
Speaker 3: So I'm told that they knew that the attack that
Speaker 3: they pursued would affect other countries. And not only did
Speaker 3: it affect other countries, they were NATO countries. And it
Speaker 3: wasn't just people sitting at home. It was critical infrastructure.
Speaker 3: So five eight hundred systems that monitor wind turbines in
Speaker 3: Germany and across Europe, those monitoring systems were knocked out.
Speaker 3: That counts as critical infrastructure, which is protected, and the
Speaker 3: other is just sitting at home being on internet. Internet
Speaker 3: communications are considered critical infrastructure. All of that is significant
Speaker 3: because it raises the question of whether NATO had any
Speaker 3: responsibility or potential to respond. Article five, which is that
Speaker 3: mutual defense clause. The idea that if one is attacked,
Speaker 3: everyone is attacked and you can respond has been very
Speaker 3: clearly expanded to include cyber No one's ever acted on
Speaker 3: that yet, but of course there was potential for NATO
Speaker 3: to say, we too have been attacked.
Speaker 1: What was the fallout, what eventually happened, How did they
Speaker 1: or did they fix the problem?
Speaker 3: They ended up having to send out more than forty
Speaker 3: five thousand modems and this took weeks. They say that
Speaker 3: they prioritized getting modems to Ukrainian distributors, so that was
Speaker 3: their main effort. And then I think the other thing
Speaker 3: that's really interesting is the US led a quiet diplomatic
Speaker 3: campaign over the course of six weeks. Once they got
Speaker 3: that internal decision or assessment that it was the gru
Speaker 3: the Russians military hackers who were responsible for this, they
Speaker 3: tried to convince the European Union that this was the
Speaker 3: case as well. They shared tech nical information, and then
Speaker 3: they went above and beyond and shared additional intelligence information
Speaker 3: with two key members of the European Union who were
Speaker 3: also the biggest victims of this attack outside of Ukraine,
Speaker 3: France and Germany. And that is so important because they
Speaker 3: are also the most influential members of the European Union,
Speaker 3: and they have also historically been very reluctant to blame
Speaker 3: anyone for attacks in public, even if they reach that
Speaker 3: same assessment in private. They don't tend to attribute attacks
Speaker 3: because of two main reasons. Really. One, you can make
Speaker 3: things worse, you can incite attacks against yourself, and you
Speaker 3: could be wrong. It's quite difficult to do attribution, and
Speaker 3: a lad a third. Germany in particular was navigating very
Speaker 3: complex relations with Russia right at the start of that
Speaker 3: invasion because it took them so much by surprise, and
Speaker 3: figuring out what their response would be of course changes
Speaker 3: the rest of European history.
Speaker 1: In the end, did the ledged target of this attack?
Speaker 1: The Ukrainian military suffer big setbacks in the early days
Speaker 1: of the war because of this. Was it successful in
Speaker 1: carrying out what it was trying to do.
Speaker 3: One senior Ukrainian cyber official said, they suffered a really
Speaker 3: huge loss in communications at the start of the war.
Speaker 3: That's pretty much the most they've ever put on record
Speaker 3: about this. My understanding is that two main things were affected.
Speaker 3: Military communications, command and control, your ability to reach your
Speaker 3: frontline troops and say move your troops here. Really really
Speaker 3: matters at the start of any invasion, and particularly this invasion,
Speaker 3: which as we know now, the Russians were intending to
Speaker 3: take the capital within three days. This was intended to
Speaker 3: be a blitzqueak, So disabling satellite communications and the ability
Speaker 3: for the military to move around and respond was an
Speaker 3: attempt to stave off any counterattacked by the Ukrainians. Ultimately
Speaker 3: it did not work, but that was what I'm told
Speaker 3: as the intention. The other thing is the drones for
Speaker 3: espionage for tracking, where the Russians are rely on satellite Internet,
Speaker 3: and I'm told that it affected that as well. I
Speaker 3: think what's interesting about this is the Ukrainians were able
Speaker 3: to come back very very quickly, essentially because of a
Speaker 3: tweet to Elon Musk and saying can we please have Starlink.
Speaker 3: Starlink is the satellite system owned by SpaceX, that's Elon
Speaker 3: Musk SpaceX that provides equivalent satellite Internet. It works in
Speaker 3: low Earth orbits, so it has multiple thousands in fact
Speaker 3: of satellites circulating the Earth, so it's harder to take
Speaker 3: out a single satellite, whereas the Viasat system relied on
Speaker 3: a geostationary satellite much higher up than just that one
Speaker 3: single satellite. VIASAC continues to face threats against this network.
Speaker 3: They told me they face ongoing and dynamic threats even
Speaker 3: up to today. So although nothing has been successful at
Speaker 3: all in the way that that February attack was last year,
Speaker 3: it certainly could conceptually happen again.
Speaker 1: Our conversation continues after the break Katrina, what are governments
Speaker 1: and companies doing to try to harden their systems to
Speaker 1: thwart future attacks.
Speaker 3: I think the answer there is not enough. That's certainly
Speaker 3: what the researchers I speak to are saying. But there
Speaker 3: is a push to develop standards. These are minimum cybersecurity
Speaker 3: standards that affect all parts of code in the satellite,
Speaker 3: encrypting data in that link, raising standards across the board.
Speaker 3: But this is a process that is really just beginning.
Speaker 3: Today's something like five thousand active satellites in orbit around
Speaker 3: the Earth. That's already a huge amount to try and protect,
Speaker 3: given you also have all the associated systems that make
Speaker 3: them work. This is growing so fast that I think
Speaker 3: that's why it's been such a wake up call to
Speaker 3: the industry. By twenty thirty, some high end estimates suggest
Speaker 3: that there could be one hundred thousand active satellites in orbit,
Speaker 3: so from five thousand to day to one hundred thousand
Speaker 3: in the space of seven years. This problem is so
Speaker 3: set to rise, and there are so many different ways
Speaker 3: to attack satellites. Way back at the beginning of the
Speaker 3: space age, no one even conceived anyone would be hitting.
Speaker 3: And it turns out that I've spoken to hackers, individual hackers,
Speaker 3: security researchers who've proved, who've shown that each of these
Speaker 3: is vulnerable.
Speaker 1: What are some of the things that all these satellites
Speaker 1: are doing.
Speaker 3: Well, there's Internet, that's one. There's satellite TV, there's earth observation,
Speaker 3: earthquake monitoring, spying. The US has its own spy satellites.
Speaker 3: But it was explained to me that every single element
Speaker 3: of the US economy that matters, whether it's chemical, industrial processes,
Speaker 3: looking for oil, even atomic clocks. So the way we
Speaker 3: get our time, the way cash machines function, the way
Speaker 3: you get gas at the pump, everything now depends on satellites.
Speaker 1: What are the things that you're paying especially close attention
Speaker 1: to Given everything that you're describing here.
Speaker 3: I think I'm really interested in any time China puts
Speaker 3: up a system that could potentially be independent of the
Speaker 3: US anytime China has a relationship with a satellite company.
Speaker 3: All of those things are areas that I think you'll
Speaker 3: see the US government look at more and more, and
Speaker 3: really a push from the US government to see how
Speaker 3: far they're going to squeeze industry to actually do anything
Speaker 3: about this. A White House official told me that companies
Speaker 3: need to radically improve the security of satellite ground systems,
Speaker 3: and that they even go to companies on occasion and
Speaker 3: tell them, hey, we've discovered a vulnerability. You need to
Speaker 3: patch this, And they don't want to say it in
Speaker 3: public because that would raise awareness of vulnerability that could
Speaker 3: be exploited by attackers. They tell companies in private, and
Speaker 3: they say sometimes companies do not take that advice and
Speaker 3: do not patch. And I think companies would have just
Speaker 3: as many criticisms back if they were speaking freely of
Speaker 3: the US government too. And so that relationship between government
Speaker 3: and commercial satellite players has got to get if it's
Speaker 3: to be solved a lot closer. They haven't quite got
Speaker 3: the level of trust that I think everyone would want.
Speaker 3: And there's a problem with classified briefings A lot of
Speaker 3: this information is classified, and yet a lot of the
Speaker 3: hacks are happening on a commercial sector, so really breaching
Speaker 3: that gap needs a lot more work.
Speaker 1: Katrina Manson, thanks so much for talking with me today.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Let's hear now from someone who knows how easy it
Speaker 1: can be to hack a satellite because he's done it himself.
Speaker 1: James Pavor tapped into commercial satellites as part of his
Speaker 1: PhD program at Oxford University. He now works on satellite
Speaker 1: security for the Pentagon. James, let me just start by
Speaker 1: asking you first, how did you become a hacker.
Speaker 2: I've been doing computer security stuff basically since I was
Speaker 2: a child. So when I was like in middle school,
Speaker 2: I was playing around with like shutting down people's computers
Speaker 2: while they're sitting next to me in the labs, that
Speaker 2: kind of like little Windows hacking type thing. And I've
Speaker 2: just always been really interested in seeing how things work
Speaker 2: under the hood, and as a hacker, like exploiting things
Speaker 2: is all about like understanding technology behind the scenes, and
Speaker 2: so that's really been super interesting for me. It's just
Speaker 2: always been like figure out how something works and then
Speaker 2: figure out how you can break.
Speaker 1: It, and then you took that kind of plane around
Speaker 1: as a kid. Much more seriously a PhD now from Oxford,
Speaker 1: and as part of that dissertation, you actually were hacking
Speaker 1: satellites for real to show vulnerabilities. Is that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Exactly so. Over the course of my PhD at Oxford,
Speaker 2: I focused on satellite system security, and in particular the
Speaker 2: like radio signals that come to satellites from Internet users
Speaker 2: and like satellite broadband services. When I say satellite broadband services,
Speaker 2: what I really mean is basically when you're using a
Speaker 2: satellite to get Internet access, and typically that means that
Speaker 2: you send a message up to the satellite, which is
Speaker 2: like get me this website, and the satelle ight. It's
Speaker 2: basically a bent pipe. You can think of the satellites
Speaker 2: as fairly dumb objects. They receive data on one antenna
Speaker 2: and then they take the data they receive and send
Speaker 2: it out on a different antenna basically, and they do
Speaker 2: no thinking, no processing, at least for Internet satellites. So
Speaker 2: they're just a pipe. You put information in one side
Speaker 2: and it comes out another side, and the only difference
Speaker 2: is when it comes out it covers a huge area.
Speaker 2: And so when you send Internet requests up to a satellite.
Speaker 2: You're just pumping information into this pipe and then it's
Speaker 2: coming out the other side to your internet service provider.
Speaker 2: And when you get a response, like a web page
Speaker 2: you've downloaded or a document you've received, it's the same thing.
Speaker 2: The service provider is putting it into one end of
Speaker 2: the pipe and then it's coming out at the broad
Speaker 2: end to your dish. The interesting thing about satellite services
Speaker 2: is that beam that comes back down to you can
Speaker 2: cover like a third of the Earth's surface, So an
Speaker 2: attacker can be thousands of miles away and getting that information.
Speaker 2: So I bought some gear and pointed at its satellites
Speaker 2: and tried to interpret what was going on. And it
Speaker 2: turns out that there's like lots of really interesting and
Speaker 2: really sense of information in these signals that an attacker
Speaker 2: with like relatively inexpensive equipment can get access to.
Speaker 1: So you said you bought equipment, what'd you buy? I mean,
Speaker 1: is it like, you know, going on Amazon just getting
Speaker 1: common stuff?
Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, so about four hundred dollars in home television equipment,
Speaker 2: the kind of satellite dish that you'd see on someone's
Speaker 2: house if they had satellite internet service. And then a
Speaker 2: special card that is designed to like let you watch
Speaker 2: satellite TV on your computer, but I basically repurposed it
Speaker 2: to take these Internet signals and get them in a
Speaker 2: format I could mess around with. I pointed my dish
Speaker 2: at satellites in geostationary orbit, so that means they're thirty
Speaker 2: thousand kilometers above the Earth's surface, and they basically don't move.
Speaker 2: They're always in the same spot in the sky, which
Speaker 2: makes them pretty easy to find and intercept signals from.
Speaker 2: And these were primarily like broadband Internet services, and I
Speaker 2: was able to see the sort of traffic people were
Speaker 2: sending over their satellite Internet connections, So stuff like text
Speaker 2: messages from people who were using inflight Wi Fi services
Speaker 2: when they're on like Transatlantic flights, or things like passengers
Speaker 2: on cruise ships when they were making payments at point
Speaker 2: of sale systems. So also a lot of like passport numbers,
Speaker 2: so when like crews, especially like cargo vessels pull into ports,
Speaker 2: they'll send information about everyone on the ship to the
Speaker 2: port authorities. That's typically over a satellite feed, and so
Speaker 2: it's pretty easy to identify those messages when you're like
Speaker 2: listening to the satellite traffic and just get like a
Speaker 2: list of everyone on the crew and when they were
Speaker 2: born and what their passport number is, Like, really concerning
Speaker 2: data to be getting in clear text.
Speaker 1: Did it surprise you how much you were able to get?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was stunned. I think that a lot of
Speaker 2: it comes from an assumption that you would need much
Speaker 2: more expensive equipment. The gear I used was very unreliable
Speaker 2: if I wanted to use it to actually be a
Speaker 2: satellite Internet customer. When it worked, because I was missing
Speaker 2: a lot of packets, there was a lot of corruption.
Speaker 2: But what I was able to do is basically reconstruct
Speaker 2: enough of the transactions, like enough of the data that
Speaker 2: I could start to get interesting information. Because a hacker
Speaker 2: doesn't need one hundred percent reliability to succeed. So the
Speaker 2: change in the model was this idea that you could
Speaker 2: get away with a lot less if you're just trying
Speaker 2: to be disruptive.
Speaker 1: So here you are hacking these satellite signals and you're
Speaker 1: doing it for academic purposes to show how vulnerable they are.
Speaker 1: But if you were doing it for nefarious reasons to
Speaker 1: try and steal this information, you would have had a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that could have caused people a lot of.
Speaker 2: Trouble definitely the data that was in there. I'm glad
Speaker 2: that as a security researcher, I was able to kind
Speaker 2: of get to it first and share it with the
Speaker 2: satellite internet service providers and kind of raise awareness about
Speaker 2: this vulnerability so that they could work towards fixing it,
Speaker 2: because I think adversaries, when they get access to data
Speaker 2: like this, could cause a lot of harm.
Speaker 1: So when you went to companies like that, what did
Speaker 1: they say. Were they alarmed? Did they immediately patch it?
Speaker 2: It was a mix of reactions. There are some companies
Speaker 2: that were fantastic. They were immediately like, thank you for
Speaker 2: sharing this information, We'll get right on fixing it. And
Speaker 2: I think they did end up making improvements to their security.
Speaker 2: They ended up checking what kind of data they were sending.
Speaker 2: There were other companies that either ignored the research, like
Speaker 2: never responded, or there were even some who like threatened
Speaker 2: to sue us. So whole gamut of different things. But
Speaker 2: I think that's just the nature of like offensive security
Speaker 2: research and vulnerability research is that you kind of play
Speaker 2: a game where people may get very defensive or very
Speaker 2: hostile to your findings, but it's still important to get
Speaker 2: it out there, so people can kind of if they
Speaker 2: want to choose to fix things, at least they know
Speaker 2: what they should be fixing.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Now that you've completed your research,
Speaker 1: you have your PhD, you've gone to work with the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: What exactly are you doing for them?
Speaker 2: I work at the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office,
Speaker 2: which is a new office within the Office the Secretary
Speaker 2: of Defense, and my agency within that is called the
Speaker 2: Directorate for Digital Services. And it's a pretty generic name
Speaker 2: because the job is incredibly broad. It's a lot of
Speaker 2: like emergency engineering, like something pops up in the world
Speaker 2: that needs something built, coded, or developed within like forty
Speaker 2: eight hours, and so instead of like going to defense contractors,
Speaker 2: we have like in house engineering expertise who can build
Speaker 2: that kind of emergency tech. So obviously I can't go
Speaker 2: into a ton of detail about all the projects I work,
Speaker 2: but it's a lot of just like really rapid organic
Speaker 2: software development and security work and advisory work for like
Speaker 2: very impactful topics.
Speaker 1: What attracted you to the Penyan I.
Speaker 2: Think for me, the opportunity to work as a civil
Speaker 2: servant in government is really compelling because you're close to
Speaker 2: the decision makers who are kind of deciding what the
Speaker 2: future of in this case the military will look like.
Speaker 2: And having a seat at that table and having a
Speaker 2: voice in those conversations can be a much bigger impact
Speaker 2: than simply like finding vulnerabilities at a big contractor and
Speaker 2: then selling them off. So for me, that's what really matters,
Speaker 2: is this idea that I could shape a safer future
Speaker 2: by being in the room when those conversations are happening.
Speaker 1: So walk us through how satellites actually work, What are
Speaker 1: the different components, and where are the places that are vulnerable.
Speaker 2: To hacking you can break satellite security into. I guess
Speaker 2: there are four domains that I like to think about.
Speaker 2: One is the ground systems, So those are the devices
Speaker 2: that users use to connect to the systems. Think like
Speaker 2: a starlink modem or a ground station that's run by
Speaker 2: a satellite service provider to collect data from their satellites.
Speaker 2: And when you're hacking ground systems, typically it's going to
Speaker 2: look a lot like bread and butter hacking. You're going
Speaker 2: to be targeting like the Windows computer that's plugged into
Speaker 2: the satellite antenna and using your Windows malware to exploit it.
Speaker 2: Then there's the communications link so that's the radio signals
Speaker 2: that go from a ground station to a satellite, and
Speaker 2: that's what I was looking at in my PhD thesis.
Speaker 2: For the most part, that's often like radio signals engineering
Speaker 2: type work and kind of looking at communications security. Then
Speaker 2: there's the bird, so there's the satellite in orbit, and
Speaker 2: there's kind of a zone of trust. Once you're on
Speaker 2: the satellite. Everything on the satellite trusts everything else in
Speaker 2: the satellite. So if you were to like compromise a
Speaker 2: camera on a satellite, you could send instructions to a
Speaker 2: flight controller because they're all plugged into the same like bus,
Speaker 2: which is basically like a wire that sends messages from
Speaker 2: devices to other devices. And so when you're thinking about
Speaker 2: like satellite security, it's often about compromising these embedded systems
Speaker 2: in orbit. And then the last topic area is kind
Speaker 2: of this broader like policy domain in terms of how
Speaker 2: people interact with and regulate satellites. I did some research
Speaker 2: on my PhD on space situational awareness data, for example,
Speaker 2: which is how countries tell each other what space debris
Speaker 2: is out there, so we don't like crash into the
Speaker 2: debris and cause damage to the space environment. And so
Speaker 2: I looked a lot at like what happens if countries
Speaker 2: lie to each other? How could those lies be detected?
Speaker 2: And that's kind of more ephemeral. There's not like a
Speaker 2: part of the satellite you can touch that is that,
Speaker 2: but it's still an important component of space security.
Speaker 1: James, which of those four areas of vulnerability you're describing
Speaker 1: the easiest for hackers to pry their way in.
Speaker 2: I think the vast majority of historical attacks on satellites
Speaker 2: have been against either the radio domain, primarily jamming attacks,
Speaker 2: So a lot of countries, as a mechanism of censorship
Speaker 2: or protest, will jam other people's satellites, and that's been
Speaker 2: going on for decades. And then there's also the ground systems,
Speaker 2: because there's so much like traditional IT systems with just
Speaker 2: like Windows computers plugged into a satellite antenna. It's easy
Speaker 2: to either accidentally hack them if you're just doing like
Speaker 2: a broad attack, or to find and hire the expertise
Speaker 2: you would need for a more targeted attack against those.
Speaker 1: So what can companies governments do to protect satellites actually
Speaker 1: enhance the security so this sort of thing doesn't happen.
Speaker 2: I think that opening up a little bit to security
Speaker 2: research is a big step in that direction. The industry
Speaker 2: has gotten by for a long time on this assumption
Speaker 2: that satellites are so expensive and so complicated that no
Speaker 2: one will ever be able to hack them, and that
Speaker 2: has sort of been true. But as technology has advanced
Speaker 2: and satellites have become more and more like other Internet
Speaker 2: of Things devices, basically that's getting less true. And there
Speaker 2: are transferable skills hackers might develop that can be applied
Speaker 2: to satellites, and so I don't think the space industry
Speaker 2: can continue to kind of hide in the shadows and
Speaker 2: get by with their easier targets. So no one's going
Speaker 2: to bother with us, and so relying on like open
Speaker 2: source protocols that can be validated at like source code
Speaker 2: level for their communications, and relying on open firmware and
Speaker 2: operating systems that people can test and prove or secure
Speaker 2: will go a lot further than hoping that your embedded
Speaker 2: proprietary software will just never be figured out by an adversary.
Speaker 2: I think that, like, there are tons and tons of
Speaker 2: people out there who would love to hack satellites, who
Speaker 2: would love to do research for free as basically a
Speaker 2: donation to the world to make it more secure because
Speaker 2: they think hacking satellites is cool. Don't think I'm the
Speaker 2: only person like that out there. I've met other people
Speaker 2: like it. And if the space industry gives people the
Speaker 2: opportunity to contribute within the security research community, I think
Speaker 2: they'll be able to make really big progress and securing
Speaker 2: these platforms.
Speaker 1: What concerns you the most, like, what is the thing
Speaker 1: as someone who knows how vulnerable these systems can be,
Speaker 1: makes you think, this is the thing that makes me worry.
Speaker 2: For me, it's the environment. So most of the repercussions
Speaker 2: of a satellite compromise are like bad. They could be
Speaker 2: very bad, like you could compromise GPS and it could
Speaker 2: lead to like a terrestrial catastrophe. But however bad it is,
Speaker 2: eventually we'll get over it. So I guess one of
Speaker 2: my biggest concerns is less about the virtual effects of
Speaker 2: hacking satellites, stealing data or disabling them, and more about
Speaker 2: the kinetic and physical effects because those can have a
Speaker 2: lasting effect on the environment. So if a satellite is
Speaker 2: destroyed and orbit in some way, that can have huge
Speaker 2: environmental repercussions. If someone hacks a rocket and causes it
Speaker 2: to break during a launch sequence, for example, then you
Speaker 2: end up with pieces of space debris that are stuck
Speaker 2: in orbit for centuries. They move at literally bullet like speeds,
Speaker 2: and if they crash into other pieces of space debris
Speaker 2: or into each other, they can generate basically tobre cascade
Speaker 2: and block orbit for a long period of time and
Speaker 2: have a lasting detrimental impact on our abilities a species
Speaker 2: to make use about our space.
Speaker 1: So when you look ahead, do you think satellites become
Speaker 1: more secure or do you think we go through a
Speaker 1: period of kind of chaos and uncertainty before something gets done.
Speaker 2: I am cautiously optimistic that satellites will become more secure.
Speaker 2: There is really great momentum around satellite security that's formed
Speaker 2: in the last four or five years. We have def Con,
Speaker 2: which is a big hacker conference in Las Vegas every summer,
Speaker 2: and they have a dedicated track within what they call
Speaker 2: the Aerospace Village to just talk about space security. We
Speaker 2: have industry advisory groups. There's a Space Information Sharing an
Speaker 2: Advisory Council which is formed between like different space industry
Speaker 2: people to talk about cyber threats. And we just have
Speaker 2: a lot of momentum building around space security and My
Speaker 2: hope is that that momentum is coming at the right time,
Speaker 2: because the decisions we make in the next three or
Speaker 2: four years I think will have a big impact on
Speaker 2: what space looks like for the next decade or.
Speaker 1: So, James, is there anything that we can do, just
Speaker 1: as you know, people consumers of technology to protect ourselves.
Speaker 2: Definitely, So when you're trying to protect your like satellite,
Speaker 2: internet signals, or really any traffic you send over the Internet,
Speaker 2: I think it's important to recognize that once that message
Speaker 2: you're sending leaves your house, you have basically no control
Speaker 2: over who gets to touch it as the gets handed off.
Speaker 2: Think like you send a letter in the mail, you
Speaker 2: don't know who the postal worker is grabbing your letter
Speaker 2: at each stage. Will be same thing with Internet traffic
Speaker 2: and so using end to end encrypted protocols, whether that's
Speaker 2: using like an encrypted chat application or using websites that
Speaker 2: use TLS. TLS is transport layer security. It's a protocol
Speaker 2: that's used to encrypt general like Internet traffic that you
Speaker 2: would have when you like visit a website, you'll see
Speaker 2: it like little lock icon in your browser when you're
Speaker 2: connected to a TLS website and it's like proven with
Speaker 2: math to be very secure against adversaries who are trying
Speaker 2: to read the content you're sending. That's a really great
Speaker 2: way to stop people like me, because even if I
Speaker 2: got your packets off of a satellite, because it happened
Speaker 2: to get sent that way, I wouldn't be able to
Speaker 2: read the contents of them. I could see the outside
Speaker 2: of the envelope, but if I opened it up, it
Speaker 2: would just be garbage, nonsense. And so whenever you can,
Speaker 2: using an encrypted communications protocol defends you against just a
Speaker 2: whole mix of attacks, whether it's satellite attacks or any
Speaker 2: other kind of eavesdropping threat.
Speaker 1: James Pavor, thanks for speaking.
Speaker 2: With me, No problem, great meeting you.
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