If you were in say, Alice Springs in Australia (wink wink) for example, you'd be able to see traffic for Indonesia, Philippines, most of South East Asia, and perhaps parts of China, South Korea and Japan if the beams are right.
location location location is an apt phrase for more than just real estate
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.
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.
The reason security is so bad everywhere is that nobody gets fired when there's a breach. It's just blamed on the hackers and everyone just goes on with life singing "We take security very seriously--this happened because of someone else!"
this must mean the consequences of such a breach has either not produced any visible damage, or the entity being damaged is uncaring (or have no power to care).
Instead we're constantly asked to sign one-sided contracts ("EULAs") which forbid us from suing. If a company's incompetence results in my data being leaked on the internet, there's no consequences. And not a thing any of us can do about it.
Yeah lets say you were carrying unencrypted frames for Bills Burger Hut.
The largest extent of the damage might be sniffing some smtp credentials or something. Bill sends some spam messages, never figures out how it was done but their IP reputation is always in the toilet.
Lets then say instead of Bills Burger Hut, you are carrying traffic for critical mineral and food industries. The attacker isnt a scammer, but a hostile nation state. Customer never realises, but theres a large, long term financial cost because (TOTALLY NOT CHINA) is sharing this data with competitors of yours overseas, or preparing to drop your pants in a huge way for foreign policy reasons.
No one gets fired until after the worst case long term damage, and even then probably not.
In fact, the likely outcome is that the burden gets moved to the customer for L2 encryption and the cowboy never changes.
Now, management, control, etc? Yeah those you need to decode in orbit.
Why would it? The data originates from earth, and should be encrypted during the uplink leg too, so the crypto should all happen in the ground segment (or even well before it reached anything that could be considered part of the satellite setup, honestly).
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.
Obviously the specific examples of end-users failing to encrypt are bad, but that's not really a problem with the satellites.
I'd blame the airline or their ISP provider for sending unencrypted traffic through the air like this. Not the satellite, but its top level customer. There's a big difference, IMHO, between your ISP being able to sniff your fiber traffic, and your traffic being observable from ~30% of the globe.
- 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.
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
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