How Secure are Decommissioned Communications Satellites?

 

These days, the vast majority of communications signals are carried over fiber-optic cables that gird the globe and form the backbone of the Internet.  But for certain purposes such as broadcasting, geostationary satellites are still important simply because they can access huge geographic areas much more cheaply than wired or fiber networks, and are sometimes the only way to access rural and remote areas. 

 

Like any other hardware, communications satellites have a limited lifetime, and after they are replaced by newer ones, the old satellites are eventually moved into "graveyard" orbits and later burn up in the atmosphere.  But in their retirement-home phase while they are still in place but not being actively used, they are vulnerable to being hacked, as a security researcher named Karl Koscher recently showed and Wired reported.  In contrast to ground-based digital networks, communications satellites are largely analog and can be hacked with relative ease.

 

The first communications satellite, Telstar 1, was launched in 1962, long before the Internet was even a gleam in Vinton Cerf's eye.  But it embodied the essential features of today's comm satellites:  a microwave receiver, some sort of signal processing that changes the frequency band to a different transmitting frequency, and an amplifier that sends out a boosted version of the weak signal received from a ground station.  Depending on the application, the transmitted signal can cover thousands of square miles where anyone with, for example, a DirecTV dish can get them.

 

While Koscher worked with the owners of a decommissioned satellite to perform his hacking, that wasn't strictly necessary.  He borrowed the transmitter and dish of an earth station set up for this sort of thing and aimed the appropriate signals at the dormant satellite, which was a Canadian unit launched in 2005 and at the end of its fifteen-year design life.  In doing so, he successfully demonstrated that he could broadcast to a good part of the North American continent using facilities that are within reach of a determined amateur hacker.

 

Someone with less benign intentions than Koscher could simply overpower a legitimate signal from a satellite's owner and essentially take over the satellite's receiver.  Whether the transmitted signal could be received by the customers would depend on how the signal is digitally encoded, but such encoding can also be hacked as well. 

 

On your list of things to worry about, this issue probably doesn't deserve a very high ranking.  Back when satellites were the only means of broadband connections between continents, they were a much more critical part of our communications infrastructure.  Now that most people, at least in North America, get their data from the Internet without need of a satellite link, because most Internet traffic is carred via undersea fiber-optic cables, the fact that old satellites can be hacked is not that threatening.  Still, the possibility exists that newer satellites could also be taken over with sufficiently powerful earth-station signals, and this would cause problems beyond simple bemusement. 

 

Unlike Internet hackers, who can hide in obscure basements in inaccessible countries and evade detection for months or years, a satellite ground station is not an easy thing to hide.  There is one such installation a few miles south of where I live in San Marcos, Texas, and although I've never driven by it to see how close I can get, the large (10-meter or so) dishes are easily visible from I-35 between here and San Antonio.  So if a satellite hacker began making a habit of pirating, it would not be that difficult to figure out where he was transmitting from, depending on the satellite's own characteristics and the amount of power needed.

 

But we are far from being done with our dependence on communications satellites.  Elon Musk is launching Starlink, a planned array of over 4,000 low-orbit satellites designed to provide Internet service for underserved nations, and eventually the entire world.  Such satellites are much harder to hack in a meaningful way, because they move fast and the loss of one or two out of several thousand is probably only a minor inconvenience to the network.  Any hacking to be done with Starlink will probably be at a higher level, resembling Internet hacking on the fiber network, which is basically independent of the hardware used for conveying the information.

 

Perhaps there is a lesson here about the nature of ethical lapses with regard to communications technologies.  Any technology that conveys meaningful information from one human to another human, regardless of what time or space intervenes, is a communications technology.  Other things being equal, enabling human-to-human communications (which is the only kind we use technology for so far) is better than not enabling it.  Of course, any communications medium can be used for evil purposes, but generally speaking, communications systems can make one of the best claims at being ethically neutral of any technology you can name. 

 

But those systems which by their nature enable one person simultaneously to communicate one way with thousands or millions of others are in a special ethical category.  This was implicitly recognized in the pre-Internet days by the extensive regulatory regimes that broadcasters worked under in many countries.  But with the advent of the Internet, the broadcaster-versus-private-communicator distinction broke down, and outfits such as Facebook found there was money to be made in intentionally blurring that distinction. 

 

Broadcast satellites are one of the few remaining technologies in which that distinction is still distinct.  But the fiber-optic Internet has made them somewhat of a niche issue in the wider scope of communications-technology ethics, and I don't worry much about facing a rash of takeovers of old comm satellites in the future, simply because there are lots easier ways to do nefarious things using communications systems that aren't tied to satellites at all. 

 

Nevertheless,Koscher's feat is a warning for future satellite operators to take extra precautions so that a hacker can't even take over the satellite except to block it from operating, which will always be possible.  But there isn't much illegitimate money to be made from that, and so Koscher's demonstration may be the last of its kind.

 

Sources:   Wired carried Lily Hay Newman's article "Researchers Used a Decommissioned Satellite to Broadcast Hacker TV" on Mar. 30, 2022 at https://www.wired.com/story/satellite-hacking-anit-f1r-shadytel. 

SpaceX Versus the Astronomers: Starlink In the Telescope Crosshairs

 

Elon Musk, who no one has accused of being shy and retiring in his corporate ventures, is engaged in deploying what he hopes will be some 40,000 low-earth-orbit satellites to form what he calls a Starlink system to provide internet service to underserved areas of the globe, and also presumably to make money.  So far, several thousand of the mass-produced satellites have been launched in batches of dozens at a time, although a recent geomagnetic storm caused an early demise for some of the newest ones as the resulting denser atmosphere at their orbital heights dragged them to a fiery death.

 

The satellites are comparatively small—about 500 pounds (220 kg) and about the size of a table—and burn up completely when they de-orbit, so we don't have to worry about pieces of them falling on our heads.  But the folks who are worried about the ones staying in orbit are astronomers, who are already seeing little bright Starlink satellite dots streak through their telescope fields of view, especially when they try to observe close to the horizon near dusk or dawn.

 

For some time now, the astronomers have been trying to garner attention for their plight, which only promises to get worse as other commercial space firms compete with SpaceX, Musk's company, to gain low-earth-orbit communications satellite market share.  Last week, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a sort of United Nations of astronomy, announced the organization of the Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Skies from Satellite Constellation Interference.  For once, the name of the new organization doesn't form a cute acronym, which perhaps bespeaks the seriousness of the endeavor.

 

The reason they call it both dark and quiet is that communications satellites, by nature, emit electromagnetic waves, usually in the microwave radio spectrum.  And although astronomers are provided with protected bits of the electromagnetic spectrum in which no radio emissions are allowed, these tend to be fairly narrow slices surrounded by wide bands where communications-related emissions are permitted.  Radiotelescopes use the most sensitive and delicate radio receivers on the planet, and they are not designed to reject nearby out-of-band interference very well.  If one of the Starlink satellites happens to sweep through the narrow beam of a radiotelescope, the satellite's emissions are likely to mess up the astronomy receiver in an unpredictable way.

 

And of course, visible-light telescopes pick up the Starlink satellites easily, even if the satellites are painted black.  One recent report in The Independent (UK) says that astronomers are seeing their visible-light exposures messed up with Starlink tracks an average of once every ten days.

 

So far, the problem is at a manageable annoyance level.  But multiply it by ten or more, and just the Starlink satellites will interfere seriously with a lot of astronomical projects, including the search for killer meteorites that might bring a premature end, not only to Starlink, but to everybody who could use it as well. 

 

It's an interesting problem in engineering ethics, if you want to view the situation through that lens.  In this corner, you have the public that would presumably like Internet access but lives too remotely for it now, and SpaceX wanting to provide that service with Starlink.  And in that corner, you have the IAU saying that what Starlink and similar firms are doing could raise havoc with a large portion of their activities.  

 

Historically, when you have a conflict between an entire industry and another popular institution such as astronomy, a third party such as government or an international organization has to get involved.  This is the way that radioastronomers obtained their reserved slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, by pleading with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for them and making effective arguments, possibly together with a little political diplomacy. 

 

Now that the commercialization of space has been going on for at least a couple of decades, we are seeing the kinds of conflicts that led to the formation in former years of the ITU for radio.  Although nobody "owns" the low-earth-orbit region of space in an exclusionary sense ("this is my two quadrillion cubic meters and you can't send your satellite into it"), it is clearly a limited resource, just like the electromagnetic spectrum, and we are now seeing an increasing need for some kind of global regulatory body to adjudicate issues such as the one that has arisen between SpaceX and the astronomers, represented by the IAU.

 

Something similar came about when transoceanic flights became routine and different countries had to arrange for protocols of using flight routes and standards for international airports.  The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), whose present embodiment dates back to 1947, arose as a part of the United Nations to perform these duties. 

 

The UN currently has a couple of branches dealing with space: the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs and a registry of objects launched into orbit.  But neither of these outfits appears to have the regulatory clout needed to deal with disputes between a brash private firm bent on networking the Earth with 40,000 satellites, and a bunch of scientists who have little money for lobbying and whose main argument is that if you clutter up our telescopes too much, there's a teeny little chance that we'll miss seeing a meteor that will creep up on us and destroy civilization.

 

So far, the astronomers are just having to deal with the problems that Starlink causes them on a case-by-case basis.  And ultimately, it's quite possible that most cutting-edge observational astronomy will move to outer space anyway, as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope promises to beat anything you can do with earth-based telescopes.  As a global culture, we may find that turning the night skies into shimmering collections of satellites and ruining them for astronomy is a reasonable price to pay for letting the most remote tribe in the world livestream SuperBowl C (100, if you're rusty on your Roman numerals).  But if that happens, I think we will have lost something that will be hard to get back.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report on The Independent's webpage at https://www.independent.co.uk/space/astronomers-elon-musk-satellites-asteroids-b2009163.html, a BBC report at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60317806 about satellites lost to a geomagnetic storm, and the Wikipedia articles on the ICAO and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs.