by vayup on 10/14/25, 4:57 AM
Some of the stuff that was extracted from the unencrypted traffic in the link:
- T-Mobile backhaul: Users' SMS, voice call contents and internet traffic content in plain text.
- AT&T Mexico cellular backhaul: Raw user internet traffic
- TelMex VOIP on satellite backhaul: Plaintext voice calls
- U.S. military: SIP traffic exposing ship names
- Mexico government and military: Unencrypted intra-government traffic
- Walmart Mexico: Unencrypted corporate emails, plaintext credentials to inventory management systems, inventory records transferred and updated using FTP
This is insane!
While it is important to work on futuristic threats such as Quantum cryptanalysis, backdoors in standardized cryptographic protocols, etc. - the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of real-world attacks happen because basic protection is not enabled. Good reminder not take our eyes off the basics.
by dylan604 on 10/14/25, 3:44 AM
As with anything in life, when it's what you know and do on the regular, that simple thing can look like magic to others. I met an old timer in the satellite business that came out to help install our receiver for a new TV channel the company I was at was getting off the ground. He found out what bird we were using and what its slot was. Based on that, he knew how many satellites over from the satellite he knew and used as his base. It was a long time running TV channel that he could find very quickly. Once that bird was located, he just manually (literally pushed the dish with his hand) counting the number of satellites that came in/out of view until he landed on "our" bird. Once there, connected our receiver and baddaboom baddabing, there it was. Once the satellite was pointed at the proper angle to the south, it took less than five minutes from him connecting his receiver to verify his base signal to packing up and heading off the roof.
His base satellite signal was unencrypted and a main reason he used it for this purpose. Our channel was scrambled, and only verifiable after our receiver with the decoder was connected. It was impressive seeing someone that good at their job make it look so easy, but after he explained the layman's version of orbital slots it became less magical. This is why magicians are meant to not tell you how the trick is done.
by protocolture on 10/14/25, 3:22 AM
Had a vendor offer a customer of mine a huge discount if they purchased radios without the encryption license in the year of our lord 2024.
Not even WPA or WEP. Just clear across the sky. And this is terrestrial.
My bet is that in space there would be a noticable increase in heat/energy if they did encryption by default. But its still incredible to see them pretend like space is impossible to get to, ultimate obscurity.
by klaff on 10/14/25, 9:02 PM
Ah, this brings back memories of listening to long-distance phone calls using a C-band dish and a general coverage (aka shortwave) receiver. Voice channels were placed on single-sideband channels between roughly DC and 6 MHz, and that whole set of signals was transmitted to the particular satellite transponder just like a video signal would be. The dish receiver couldn't decode that but it had a subcarrier output intended for accessories (stereo decoders maybe?). By plumbing the subcarrier output to the antenna input of the shortwave radio you could dial around to individual voice channels. I could only hear one side of the calls, but it was still very enlightening. I heard a number of mundane conversations, one drug deal, and a woman cursing in ways I'd never heard before. This was pre-internet and I was an impressionable kid - maybe 13 or so. Fun times.
by wyager on 10/14/25, 3:46 AM
I see no issue with the satellite backhaul itself being unencrypted; anyone using the satellite provider should assume they're hostile and encrypt+authenticate everything they send anyway. I don't trust my ISP's fiber to be snoop-resistant just because they nominally have some shitty ONT encryption.
Obviously the specific examples of end-users failing to encrypt are bad, but that's not really a problem with the satellites.
by dsab on 10/14/25, 4:10 AM
I was working in space industry and ECSS security guidelines are missleading grant seeking startups to try to reinvent TLS on orbit. There are to mamy bureaucracy. ECSS guidelines for software teams were created by people who never written a Hello World in their life, just look at specs of ECSS Packet Utilisation Service, it's a joke, that's why I prefer to work for VC funded companies than grant funded.
by dweekly on 10/14/25, 2:54 AM
by ROBLOX_MOMENTS on 10/14/25, 3:10 AM
Is it correct to Assuming the amount of Mexican companies in this paper is because of their receiver being in the major city southwestmost corner of the country ?
by fennec-posix on 10/14/25, 2:54 AM
Section 6.3.2 is an eye-opener... good lord... Gets even worse at 6.4.2-3
by lambdaone on 10/14/25, 3:26 AM
Absolutely mind-boggling that this is a thing; not just that satellite links aren't per-user link-encrypted, but also that people are still using unencrypted protocols to exchange sensitive information on the public internet in 2025.
by atarvaneitor on 10/14/25, 5:04 AM
Does anyone remember the days when you pointed a 60cm antenna at the Hispasat 30W and connected your DVB-S2 tuner in Windows, Using Crazycat's BDADataEx, you tuned an IP data transponder. Using a technique called Satfish (with a software I don't remember), some files were reconstructed, usually vsat data from oil platforms... and porn.
I'm going to dust off the TBS DVB-S2X card and try to find a data transponder to test the DontLookup app.
https://github.com/ucsdsysnet/dontlookup
Where I live, it's almost impossible to find any interest in FTA or pirated SAT TV.
att: ham radio operator interested in satellite radio :D
by BonusPlay on 10/14/25, 12:21 PM
by jeff_lee on 10/14/25, 7:56 AM
Who needs hackers when companies broadcast their secrets to half the planet?
by OnACoffeeBreak on 10/14/25, 10:44 AM
From the Introduction: "Each satellite may carry traffic for dozens of independent networks through an array of on-board transponders, each covering a diameter of thousands of kilometers (at most a third of Earth’s surface)".
Can someone help me understand the use of "diameter" in this sentence. I am guessing it refers to the satellite's signal coverage of the Earth's surface. If that's the case, wouldn't something like arc degrees be a better measure? I just can't figure out how "diameter" can be used to describe a coverage arc or area.
by vzaliva on 10/14/25, 6:03 PM
In view of this disclosure I am even more dissapointet T-mobile satellite service (via starlink) does not support Signal messenger.
by drsopp on 10/14/25, 6:26 AM
by modeless on 10/14/25, 3:17 AM
> remarkably, nearly all the end-user consumer Internet
browsing and app traffic we observed used TLS or QUIC
There was a surprising amount of resistance to the push to enable TLS everywhere on the public Internet. I'm glad it was ultimately successful.
by bschne on 10/14/25, 1:02 PM
Tangential, but I was very surprised to learn recently that my country still has a more or less nationwide POCSAG pager network where only some users encrypt their traffic
by elevation on 10/14/25, 1:58 PM
As an aside, the PDF metadata says it's generated from LaTeX, but the layout and typesetting looks better than the LaTeX output I'm familiar with. Nicely done.
by metalman on 10/14/25, 10:34 AM
I think that the risk of anybody achiving a malicious outcome by accessingn these data streams is as spectacularly low as the effort required to get the signal and then figure out some context to the randomised transmissions and then weaponise that is high, very high.
Presumably it is GB/sec by however
many channels, 99% of it will dry your eyeballs out and quickly render even the most determined spook a quaking quivering mess huddled in the corner of an office screaming " make it stop"
the researchers behind this are just showing off, but I will bet any money, nothing but nothing could keep them there going through the worlds slop, which a smart, counter spook would insure was a regular and tantilising portion of the signal to begin with.
the issue is that these sattelites are just repeaters, and there is little ryme or reason to the content, and personel good enough to work it, can find much much more profitable things to do.