[HN Gopher] Eavesdropping on Internal Networks via Unencrypted S...
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Eavesdropping on Internal Networks via Unencrypted Satellites
Author : Bogdanp
Score : 162 points
Date : 2025-10-20 22:21 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu)
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| I'm not sure where the novelty is in this research. It's
| basically reporting something that has been universally known for
| decades.
| pmontra wrote:
| Universally known to whoever wanted to intercept that traffic.
|
| Maybe and hopefully not known to the staff of those networks
| (the current staff could be maintaining what somebody else set
| up) as some of those companies fixed the problem when contacted
| by the researchers.
|
| For sure not known to me and a lot of other people. I believed
| that everything in digital streams was encrypted. Ok, those ATM
| connections are probably tech from the 90s, but they probably
| had upgrades in part because of regulations. Privacy, security,
| nothing?
| everdrive wrote:
| It's an interesting problem. The reality is that for any
| decently-sized business people don't really know their
| networks. Their assumptions are sane, but often simply
| incorrect. I've heard a lot of people say things like "well
| the traffic is not going externally, so it's fine to leave it
| unencrypted." It's a bold, and almost always unchecked
| assumption.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Even when the assumptions are correct, you're depending on
| people doing their jobs correctly.
|
| Over the years, I've found shockingly bad failures, usually
| on areas of internal networks where there is ambiguity as
| to what internal org is responsible. In old companies with
| data centers and cloud, there's often pretty bad gaps.
| noir_lord wrote:
| It doesn't help that practising even reasonable security
| comes at such a cost many orgs find reasons to not justify
| doing it - we've spent decades creating systems that are
| difficult to secure at every level and hand waving it away
| and now it's a wobbly jenga tower of systems.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Correct, this is why HTTPS (and encryption in general over the
| network) has become so popular. This property of traffic being
| intercepteable is also present in cable traffic as well, it's
| not hard to intercept traffic, you just find a tap, plug in a
| cable and observe, it's not even obviously illegal, there are
| many legitimate reasons to plug in a cable in a tap in the
| public, so there's a lot of possible alibis.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Unlike wired traffic, you're blasting this all over a huge
| patch of ground that's possibly as large as 1/3 the surface
| of the earth.
|
| You could be getting listened to from _anywhere_.
| natch wrote:
| Define "known." To those of us who have only heard rumors, it's
| good validation.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| In this case, well-publicised in research presented at major
| conferences, and in associated media reporting over multiple
| decades.
| natch wrote:
| It's also known that things get better over decades even if
| problems have been reported in the past, so it's good
| information here showing that the problems are not yet
| fixed.
| lukeinator42 wrote:
| The paper seems to highlight that the novelty is in their
| general parser that worked across 39 different GEO satellites,
| and that it works with a couple hundred dollars of consumer
| grade equipment. From the paper:
|
| "Our technical contributions include:
|
| (1) We introduce a new method to self-align a motorized dish to
| improve signal quality. Specifically, we could receive IP
| traffic from 14.3% of all global Ku-band satellites from a
| single location with high signal quality and low error rate.
|
| (2) We developed a general GEO traffic parser that can blindly
| decode IP packets from seven different protocol stacks that we
| observed in our scans. Five of these stacks have never been
| reported in any public research we are aware of."
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| By next year encryption will be vastly more prevalent across
| geostationary satellite links, and it will be entirely due to
| this research (the actual mechanism being "everyone who 'knew'
| this internally now being empowered to fix it, rather than
| uselessly 'know' it, because now it's public and newsworthy and
| embarrassing.")
|
| I'll let other people comment on the actual novel elements of
| the research, because those exist too. But I want to point out
| that some huge portion of the value of public security research
| is really "intellectual garbage pickup": calling out bad
| technical debt that "everyone knew about" and turning it into
| actionable security upgrades. Security research is a good part
| of the reason it's mostly safe to browse the web on public
| Internet connections, when it wasn't a decade ago.
|
| PS As someone who is very cynical about security deployment,
| even I thought cellular network backhauls would all be
| encrypted as a matter of course by now, at least in the US.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| What makes this paper so unique, compared with the dozens of
| others that have preceded it (and attracted coverage in the
| tech media) over that past 20 years that it is going to drive
| such rapid change?
|
| Black Hat, DEF CON etc seem to have a presentation just about
| every year that can be summarised as "DVB-S is fair game if
| you have a few hundred bucks and a quiet afternoon."
|
| Here's a decent history of the state of play up to 2009. The
| authors recognised back then that this is already ground well
| covered.
|
| http://archive.hack.lu/2009/Playing%20with%20SAT%201.2%20-%2.
| ..
|
| And more of the same from 2020.
|
| https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20M.
| ..
|
| Then you've got coverage of the cool applications of this
| property of VSAT hops, such as the Russian intelligence
| services using it as a malware exfiltration vector.
|
| https://media.kaspersky.com/pdf/SatTurla_Solution_Paper.pdf
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I know the authors so I'm aware of the intense amount of
| responsible disclosure they've been doing, and the very
| substantial behind-the-scenes impact this is having. So
| maybe the difference is the scope of this, the number of
| protocols and vendors they were able to detect and attack
| in one go, and also the way they're approaching disclosure.
| In other words they're being much more systematic in every
| aspect of the research, disclosure and re-analysis. I
| expect some people won't take seriously and there will be
| more papers in the future.
|
| I mean another way to put this is: maybe there's a problem
| if you can say "there's loads of previous work" and yet
| massive and systemic problems still exist. Where that
| problem is (holistic nature of the research or the
| disclosure process) is probably something you could drill
| down into. But you've basically admitted the previous
| research didn't do the job, so all we're doing is haggling
| about the price.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575391
| ZiiS wrote:
| Seems very odd to list HTTPS. Intercepting traffic which is only
| encrypted at a different network layer, is not in any meaningful
| way intercepting unencrypted traffic.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| HTTPS still exposes hostnames in most cases, so you can get a
| gist of wat someone is doing on the internet even if you can't
| see the exact contents.
|
| The unencrypted transmissions (SMS, phone calls) are much more
| interesting to listen in on, of course.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| A director of the NSA once said something like "we launch
| missiles based on metadata alone."
| promptdaddy wrote:
| "We kill people based on metadata" Michael Haydon
|
| Had to look that up.
| themafia wrote:
| Now they're killing people based on language models. It
| always cracks me up that the big worry with available AI
| is that people will somehow use it to manipulate other
| people on the internet; meanwhile, the government has
| turned it into an assassination tool.
| stopbulying wrote:
| While AI language models can emulate legal and judicial
| language, they are not sufficient substitutes for Due
| Process of Law because they have a comparably
| unacceptable wrongful conviction rate given that there
| are "hallucinations" and false citations.
| worik wrote:
| But they are doing it in secret.
|
| "Due process be damned" is the apparent attitude
| zzrrt wrote:
| I'm aware of rumors about Israel using AI in war, but
| where are you hearing of it being used in legal and
| judicial settings? Besides a few lawyers getting caught
| and sanctioned, I don't think it's happening much.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| Because manipulating billions of people a year is worse
| than assassinating 500 a year? Doesn't seem hard to
| figure out.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Hostnames, IP addresses and maybe occasionally an HTTP
| connection that lets you tie all that metadata to an actual
| human identity.
| userbinator wrote:
| This reminds me of what happened decades ago:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_receive-only
|
| tl;dr: Satellite TV signals were originally unencrypted and one
| would watch TV for free with a suitable receiver, but the
| broadcasters didn't like that, resulting in them eventually being
| encrypted.
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