From Sputnik To James Webb: Satellite Comms And Security

[applause] So, I I am going to have to apologize. I may end up in a bit of a coffin fit if occasionally because stupid stupid people who gave me the Lergie and my bloody family didn't get it. Only I did, which is quite annoying. So, who am I? Uh, okay. Oh, press the on button works. Who am I? This is me when I was younger, thinner, and more her suit. Um I uh yeah those are my socials. I'm work at PTP um where I sort of I do a hardware hacking and I'm head of R&D. Um not that that's exciting. My avatar is most commonly known because we we got drunk one day and decided to burn a

Furby because why not? That is the highest resolution that 2008 will give you by the way. So, oh yeah, I'm what I really am not is I'm a totally serious person who will not find the name of the of the seventh planet in the solar system amusing. I will not find anything about that planet amusing at all. [snorts] So, one of the reason why I'm talking here is not Oh, yeah. This I'm not the only one. Um, one of the reasons why I'm doing this talk is is is people have seen me talk on various different things from my from security perspective. My last talk I was doing this year was on uh uh psychological stuff. Um, but my actual

degree is in planetary science and astron astronomy and I can't even say the name of my degree. Um, is space stuff is is what my actual degree is in. And as the theme this year is space, I decided to actually go on a bit about how space communication works and how, you know, amazing it can be. By the way, the time has gone to sleep. Uh there are high technical technology here. Um so anyway, this is space which I'm endlessly fascinated about. I'm going to quote the late great Douglas Adams here is space is big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. You I mean you might think it's a long way down the

road to to chemist but that's peanuts compared to space. It's sort of mind-blowing how big it is. It's uh and and how many fascinating and interesting things you can find in there. You know as as humans we have probed our solar system quite definite. We've been to every single one of the eight planets which are listed up here and if you can remember the rhyme from your school then you know you can repeat it to yourself. Um we've been to dwarf planets like Pluto. We've been to uh a Kyper belt object which is at the far end of the solar system. Um which is Akasaur. No getting the wrong name. It used to be called Ultimate Tool. Um and then

there's I can't rename that one. It's the asteroid we landed at. we landed Rosetta probe on and we've been to moons like Talisto and and Enceladus there. So, it's absolutely amazing how far we've gone, what we've done from this tiny little gravity well in in the where we're based. Um, I'm going to get into the physics here a bit because there is quite a bit of physics in this and I do apologize. I will be asking questions later so I hope you take notes. That's that's a bit of a joke. So, what what is space? What is where we are? We live on this planet there. We live on this planetary area. I'm sorry to say the earth is not flat.

I can definitively say space exists. The earth is not flat and whatever conspiracy theories. Oh yeah, chemtrails don't exist. There we are. Um but we have many layers of atmosphere above us. We have proposphere which is bounded by the the ozone layer and the stratosphere. Normally if you got a weather balloon which every is the easiest way to see the curvature of the earth is you launch that up that will go up to the stratosphere. Beyond that we got the messosphere and then there's a common line. The common line was decided by um an American Hungarian physicist called Carmon that that would be the rough border of it. It's set at 100 km cuz it's a convenient

number that's all. And that's in the middle that's in the very start of the thermosphere. Then we enter into the ex exosphere. What will become later is bits of the meosphere and the thermosphere and a tiny bit of stratosphere. Um is called the ionosphere which is basically a cloud of ionic particles which sort of surrounds and protects the earth. Without that we'd be dead. We there wouldn't be us. We'd be like Mars, a dead baron universe. A universe planet. Um let's just where satellites often live in in astronomical terms is we're surrounded by these thing called the Van Allen belt van Allen belts which are basically radiation that is uh uh hit by as a solar panel solar panel the the

solar wind hits our planetary um atmosphere it creates what a load of radiation which is what we call the van Allen belt and they're sort of like donuts. Um so we have low earth orbit where most satellites are which is close to us. It's not particularly stable but and it requires quite a bit medium earth orbit and geocynchronous orbit. Fant about geocynchronous orbit is it's a 24-hour cycle. So basically it means the satellite can be directly above us. [snorts] What does that look like? That is low earth orbit. Uh that's a satellite tracking website that you can use. It's public accessible and you can see all of those. most of those are stling um which is the sort of impact that that

Musk has had on the world so far. Um if we zoom out a bit we can see it's it's quite hard but you can see the geostationary ones in this ring around um basically the poles and up at the top you can see sort of see the medium earth orbits. So that's how our planet is surrounded. We've got loads and loads of satellites. To be honest, our modern life wouldn't work without it. I I use GPS to get here. That's satellite driven. Some people are Starling. Uh satellite phones allow people to get connectivity where you can't normally get it that where you can't have cells, can't have cables, etc. Satellites have revolutionized re re have improved our lives. Um they've

also brilliant for for science because we can do amazing things that I'll go into a bit later that we'll never known about the universe without satellites. Um, so how do we start? How do we get something from this gravity well into space? This, uh, this here is a is is an artist rendition of the V2 rocket, which was, um, a wartime rocket developed in 1942, I want to say. I might be wrong. I'm not a historian. Um, by German scientists as a way of easily bombing uh, Amsterdam and London and some of the northern bits. It had range. It was a bit flaky initially and would occasionally fall apart, but it did have an impact.

Allegedly, not much of an impact because it costs a way more than it actually did for the Germans. Um, so but it meant that there's a load of rocket scientists that the Germans had which everybody wanted. So they pretty much as soon as the US and Russia came in, they went we'll have you and stole people abroad. um across there are lots and lots of programs that you can re see about that um but that's how they start this oh sorry go on to rocketry there is another problem with rocketry and I'm going to get into an equation here which is how do we get a payload in space so we can get payload is all about mass and

we have to achieve a certain amount of velocity to get off this overcome gravity overcome air resistance and all that and one of the problems with that is you have to account for fuel and fuel weighs amount. So, we have to work out how much fuel we need to get off, including the fuel that we need to get off the planet, which is what that equation is. That's the ideal rocket equation. And it basically goes on about how much mass you need. This is why getting stuff into space is expensive because we need to have the fuel. Um, in the old days, that one that that rocket uses ethanol and oxygen mix. So, basically, it's powered by vodka.

which I'd love to say I would as well, but I don't think you can get a rock in space based on a bit on a pint of dog. So, several people I know would probably try. Um, uh, nowadays we tend to use methyloxs or meth methane. So, uh, which tends is SpaceX use started to move towards methyloxs whereas it used to use methane and with an oxygen starter. I'm going really too fast now. So another thing that we need to to do when we get into communication, we need to understand the electromagnet magnetic spectrum. So this is something that covers everybody I I can see everybody who failed physics is going no cuz they can all remember that from school. Um

it's a big thing that that requires us to allows us basic communication. This is used in normal communications and everything like that. um is gamma rays and x-rays are used in uh in in in medical applications. We see things because of light um etc etc. So it's but the problem is the the atmosphere will block most of these pretty much except for visible visible light infrared ultraviolet and radio waves it will block most of that. So we h we we can't use a lot of these things to carry messages. So this is roughly we use something called modulation to try and do it. We have what's called a carrier wave which is a basically a standard um

frequency that a standard basically wave that we can modify together and we can do that by a number of different methods. AM is used to be old radios. I remember tuning to those. FM is is sort of more modern ones and digital is what we use is a sort of mix of those. Anybody remembers um computers in the 80s and loading stuff from tapes? That's sort of you'll use normal digital modulation to try and get the frequencies of it. I have talked about that in the past cuz I'm quite a geek for that. Um so to get to propagate stuff because we can't run a cable everywhere. Definitely can't launch a a you know a satellite 15,000 km into

space with a cable attached to the back of it. that really won't work. So we have to there's a multiple way number of ways that we can um propagate messages. So uh one thing is ionospheric bouncing which is how we used to do this in uh basically started before we in the satellite era is you can bounce a message directly off the ionosphere which I mentioned earlier uh that that was quite commonly used uh to get messages from like America to Europe. and beyond the curve of the earth. There's the other thing that we can also use is a moon because that's static. There is a 2.6 second delay cuz it takes 1.3 seconds for light to reach the moon

and 1.3 seconds for light to reach back again. That was successfully tested by this is um um American US ship called the moon relay which tried this as an experiment. It worked but it's not that feasible. And nowadays we use basically uh we can use satellite ones using uh where's the term? My brain's not working. Uh it's listed on it. It's we can use basically a bend on the satellite to allow a satellite to relay us a message also because we can choose what satellite is. We don't have a problem with time on that one. That's sort of how satellite phones work. Um right, I'm going to start you with a bit of history of space exploration. This is where we

start to get into the techy bits. There we are. End of physics. Okay. Um, so anybody recognize us? That's Sputnik one. There were two Sputnik. Sputnik one, Sputnik 2, which were the basically the Russian winning the first step of the um the space race between the US and and and uh the USSR. So, Sputnik went into orbit for 22 days, but Sputnik won before it basically de-orbited. That's a photo I took of um I can't remember where that is. That's from the Udar Hazy Center near Washington DC. I took that photo when I visited it uh many years back. Um that's I think that's a replica of the original Sputnik. Uh so, it's not very big. It really

isn't that that large. Um anyway, this is roughly what the signals for the Sputnik look like. Uh there was a lot of questions about how I suddenly realized I forgot to bring my mouse, so I've got to try and do it. Uh give me a second. Right. So, I'm now going to play uh first off, I'm I'm going to play two two bits of sound samples. And I'm a bit worried that because I've not connected this to the internet, it might not work. The first one is possibly the greatest misuse of a voice actor ever from Civilization 4. Nope. I It won't work because I'm not connected to the internet. Um, no, I'm going to skip that. So, basically,

there's a sound sample of Leonard Nimmo, who plays Spock in Star Trek, going beep beep beep, which is just total wasteful. Um and then we have a sound sample of the actual splitnet communication which is basically uh a beep and it just repeats beep beep beep uh every roughly every few seconds and that just continues. That was the whole of the split lick signal. So uh there is no data in it um which many people have tried analyzing doesn't mean that people weren't worried about it. There have been papers that have been published about the transmission data. Um, and this is a declassified document that came out in I think it was the 80s. Um, but it was obviously written

beforehand which basically looked into transmission to try and find any sort of data that could be found in that Sputnik signal cuz there was total paranoia at the time. Um, there we are. That's a basic statement is what could it have monitored? What could it have sent? To be honest, not much. There wasn't much battery in the Sputnik. Even if it did, it couldn't send that much data. Um, anyway, I'm going to map a few. I've used AI to generate me images. Okay, it's terrible. I'm not a good artist. Um I'm going to map a few of the infosc con cons concepts to uh the space and see how they get represented. So we'll start with

everybody's favorite confidentiality. So one of the problems with space travel is a lot of the technology was designed in the ' 50s '60s '7s 80s ' 90s and I don't know how many of you remember how much encryption was in there. There's bugger. It's like exor encryption was all I remember. There was um sorry I'll go to an example in a second but there was a point where it was actually illegal at certain points to actually export encryption from the US. Um that was up till the early 2000s I believe >> 2001. >> 2001 yeah um so let's have a quick look but even still it affects modern day. So SpaceX is I'm not a big fan of Musk, but SpaceX

is an is an amazing organization. It has revolution re revolutionize the way that we do space travel. It's taken it away from NASA, moved a lot towards um commercial game and has actually changed how we do it. They've done reusability. It's actually quite amazing. Um that do not endorse Musk. I endorse SpaceX. It's not him. He's not the engineer but until recently the they have a lot of telemetry feeds everywhere. So all there's cameras and there's telemetry feeds from all their rockets. It is related to space travel. This is still a secret technically from US uh one because it's all related to rocketry and everything to do with rocketry is a US secret. So you wouldn't really want that to be

private would you? Sorry public would you? So, you can if you have an SDR, I was going to bring one as a prop, but I forgot it because my brain isn't working at the moment. Um, you can buy SDRs for 100 quid. They're not exactly expensive. And if you were roughly in the area, you could you you could get the launch of it. You could read the telemetry. This is the frequency that it is on. There are plenty of places. This is root root.cz, CZ which um has has listed a load of these and decoded them. Uh there is one thing it's like like don't annoy radio engineers because they're real geeks and they will reverse

engineer everything. So you can see there that that they've taken everything they I think I'm good at reverse engineering. I'm nothing compared to that. uh about the amount of levels where they can just read a radio signal, work out the modulation, work out the bits that that are everything. So we can actually then take the take the telemetry and actually get the images directly from the cameras which is really nice. Fortunately, they now encrypt it. So this is a legacy demo. Um but this is quite common throughout. I've got a few more examples that probably should have been early in my presentation. So, this is an example of of how encryption used to be a secret.

Um, this is from the late '9s, a t-shirt of 95. It's a t-shirt to the RSA encryption algorithm and it was done as a protest against the US export regulations with cryptography. Anybody who tests TLS, this is why we have export level encryption ciphers and we find them still every bloodywhere. uh PO satellite. So the POS satellites are meteorological satellites done by uh NOAA which is a north oceanic it it's written up there. Um but polar operational everything gets becomes acronyms and it really my brain runs out. I've got so many acronyms stored I will forget half of them. But [clears throat and snorts] the pose is basically it monitors satellite details. It does it's a meteorological satellite.

It looks for clouds. It looks for anything that looks weird on the on it. It's quite high level. You won't get like detailed photos of your house from it, but you'll get a photo of a country. Um, I was going to do this as a relatively live demo, but you can see right at the top there, it was decommissioned in August. I started having to mess around with this at the first week in September. And and it took me years going, why isn't this working? Why can't I pick up the signals? Oh, it's been decommissioned. That was thanks. There's no reason for decommissioning other than basically a certain uh the US current leadership decided to decommission it.

So, it uses an analog method of transmission. So, it it will translate data and it will have an analog feed directly from the cameras on it which you can pick up. Um you can pick it up with this equipment. So, that's an SDR that will cost you about 100 quid. That's you can make that yourself with a couple of bits of bent coat hanger and a chop box and a bit of coax and that is a is a signal amplifier. You don't necessarily need one for pose but for other satellite ones you you do. This is essentially how to pick stuff up from satellites. That is generally your equipment. Um this is roughly what what

it sounds like. I was going to play a sample of the wave. Uh it's it's a bit like uh it's sort of like like a few beats but but you have occasional sort of sound like an old tape player from the 1980s if you play games or a modem if you remember those. I'm starting to realize some of the people in the audience won't have done modems or tapes. And now I'm going to start feeling really old. Um so anyway, this can be downloaded. There's a program called Sap Dump. It's totally open source, free to do. We'll do a load of different satellites. Um I as I said I couldn't find one because I they decommissioned the soding

satellites. I spent ages waiting for one to pass over my house and then it's like oh it's been decommissioned. So I did the cheat method and I downloaded a pre-made W file that somebody else had downloaded had listen sniffed from it. Um so it's relatively simple program. It does all the thinking for me which I like in programs. I like things to do my thinking. So this is the general output. You've got multiple different images. This is in different levels. You can see UK there. You can see Iceland there. Uh you can't see Scandinavia. So this is um visible light. This is infrared. So it allows you to see a number of things. You can

see the clouds. You can see the penetration to the clouds. Uh you can see the rough heat level. So it's perfect for meteorologists. I'm not a meteorologist. So somebody who's meteorological can understand this. There are other sensors streams on there. Um, but yeah, they're not visually appealing. [snorts] Sorry. [cough] Right. Integrity. Um, so we all know integrity is is is reading stuff. So this is sorry I I've just realized I don't have my notes and my brain is as I said is going um I've lost me cursor it doesn't matter uh

right so that that is one of the satellites in medium earth orbit I sorry I can't remember the name it it's yeah don't have lurgy before you do your talk you forget the basic things so [clears throat] that is a communications relay satellite so that will relay communications and it's used by the US uh military to relay communications between various parts of the different Americas uh it it it basically is just a nice relay everything's encrypted because it's military military encryption the the actual messages aren't encrypted, but the contents of the messages are. So, it's everything that we normally expect. TLS, you know, fully protected. There's no real way of abusing that, is there? Except it relays. It doesn't

check who's sending the messages. So, when you got a load of Brazilian radio pirates who decide that they want to pass on where should we drop our drugs, it's a perfect thing to bounce off. So, and the problem is because it it is it's relatively short um one you don't your power in the equipment isn't that much. So, you can make it move it. Someone wants to track you, they can't. So, it's the old thing we don't there's no checking of integrity. There's no checking of who's doing that relay. Um and let's go quickly onto availability. This is a tiny bit of integrity in it as well, but I couldn't quite do it. uh example I used to get here today

is something called GNSS which is the the whole global navigational satellite services which cover GPS which is the first one GLONAS BU Galileo QZ SS IRSS so those are all the you know the different ones that you can do there's loads of loads of them most what times your phone will use GPS glowness and Galileo Um, but there are alternatives like BU. [clears throat] How does it actually work? I I actually asked my my eldest went on a car journey once. It was a very boring car journey. Um, and he was going on about, well, you send a message to satellites and the satellite works out where you are and sends it back. And it's like, that's not

really feasible, is it? So, you got these satellites and have been there since 1978. Your GPS transmitters, you can get a GPS module that's like that big. It's not got much of an aerial. It's not got any power at all. You can fit it in a phone. It drains your phone, but it doesn't drain it that much. You've got to you've got to physically power it somehow. It can't really be an active transmission medium because you just don't have enough power. It's got to be totally passive. So, the easiest way, and it's defined in there's a number of different ISGPS specifications, which are all public. uh this is 800 which is uh the L1C which is the frequency that it one of

the frequency it uses. The 200 is the actual basic one. Um and that defines what it does and basically it sends a time stamp and then it can use that time stamp to actually work out where you are. So here's roughly what it uses. It's got a navigational message. It's got a what's called a CA code. That's your civilian one rather than the protected code which is slightly more complicated and that was used by the US military and is encrypted and you got the carrier wave and remember where we did carriers all the way back there. So that's just standard frequency. They get uh they get exored together and they get sent out so you can then deexort them and it's

relatively quick to do. So there's two bits of important information here, the navigation message and the CA code. So this is your CA and it's a frame divided into subframes and pages and bits. So the important bits are your uh oh sorry press the wrong button. You have uh my laser stopped working. There we are. We have a clock which is your clock feed. And the clock's quite funky and I'll go into that a bit later because it's a very weird way of doing a clock. You have your I can't even say that. A fer a epheff >> that's a booger. Um so that is an old school term for when uh people used to

do astronomy and they used to look at telescopes and they used to go oh this is where Pluto will be or this is where Jupiter will be and it used to be a paper almanac and this basically says where the satellite is. It lasts for about 4 hours. The that word um and what you'll get later is you'll also get part of something called the almanac which is basically two weeks of where that satellite is. So your receiver can go here's satellite one and I've just got a signal from that there. Satellite 2, satellite 3 and munch them together triangulate do a bit of mass on the actual receiver and the receiver works out where you are. That's why in

the old days, if you remember old like TomToms and so on, it would say right collecting satellites, you give you three, three, four, and then you could see your actual um uh uh your accuracy get further. So, going back to it, this CA code I've just remembered is called a PRN. I don't know what it is. I couldn't be bothered to Google it. I just had too much of acronyms at that point. Um the the PRN is a unique number. It's a 1023 bit message that is repeated regularly and basically it covers two one bit of that is 293 m of distance from the satellite to you. So we are talking highly exact numbers because if that's basically sent every 1

millisecond. So every if you're if you're out by a millisecond sorry every microscond if you're out by a microscond it covers 293 meters that's quite a bit of accuracy that you need to account for so we have what's called time that we need to work out so who knows what time is this [laughter] >> uh I mean my time says 101 but it's British summer time that says I've got 11 minutes left I know Um uh that's British summer time. That's the time zone and that's an arbitrary time zone that we decided to have. Um time in the US is whatever it is currently plus - 5. So but we can't do that when we're doing

exact literally to the to the microscond times. We need to have something we have something called GPS time and GPS time is based on UTC which is drench mean time basically. Um uh and it it's it's done in a weird way. You have bits for weeks and you have bits for um uh time number of one and a half second periods within that week. So it's a bit strange you and you have it all goes from uh an epoch of 1980 I think it's 6th of January 1980 midnight and then it's number of one and a half second counts until the end of the week and then the week rolls over and it goes on to the next week which is all fun. um

GPS time it it one of the problems is because we're so exact as well we have to account for relativity in this so it you're at the point where the actual calculations you do need to account for relativity in this one you have it defines the speed of light in the actual standard that is actually the speed of light the speed of light is defined nowadays it used to be defined uh in in in terms of uh counts of meters but now the meters are actually defined in terms of speed of light and the second is defined in terms of the speed of light. It's one of those universal constants that doesn't change. That is

guaranteed to be correct and it is the right value. Um all old people we remember the millennium bug. I remember working that night. I remember all the setup. So the millennium bug for those in the younger ones I'm assuming that some people might not remember it or think it was a myth. Um was in the old days people would use a twodigit field for year. So it' be and they'd add 19 to the front and then came to the 20th century and suddenly everybody went oh yeah that would get confusing. Everything would suddenly drop a hundred years in the back in the past. So a lot of money was spent to make sure this didn't happen. Um I

remember doing testing for it. I remember actually working that night um instead of getting drunk like all my mates. It was quite annoying. Um but yeah it it's a big thing. It's known now as a sort of the class of bugs when you have date rollovers. Everybody's uh people have heard of the 2038 bug in Unix which is when the 32bit time t rolls over which hopefully we shouldn't have because it should be 64-bit by then. GPS has that. This is the standard for uh transmission week number. I mean you can see how complex standard is by how many bloody subsections there are in that. Um I'm going to just highlight words. So 10 bits 10 LSPs. So anybody's used to

binary how large a number can you get in 10 bits? >> Yeah, 24. So 1,024 and remember we're counting weeks from 1980,024 divided by 52 is is 19.7. So every 19.7 years we will get reach an epoch and we'll have a problem. last one 20 was was April 19 2019 uh there were impacts uh it wasn't totally one Apple had to push an emergency patch to iOS to make sure that nothing happened fortunately people realized it there were um a lot of ones were like parking machines failed so you you got to pay your parking go because of course everything gets a fee from GPS for time next one oh sorry next one here. Uh, that's a different one. Sorry.

Next one is 2038, but not April, which is when the Unix one is. It' be November. So, I'm planning to retire by then or maybe go into contract and get some money. I I don't know. Um, so next impact is we get so that's uh availability problems. The next one is we can have I'm going to whilst you're on GPS, I'm going to go into GPS spoofing and jamming. So this is my colleagues in who do aviation [clears throat] stuff have written about GPS spoofing on aviation safety. This is quite big at the moment. I've seen news articles about this quite often. It's affecting this was like you know a couple of days ago. Uh

it's affecting like defense ministers going over Russia, parts of Eastern Europe, parts of the Middle East. There is active spoofing and jamming. Spoof is easy. You know what the carrier wave is. There are anti- spoofing protections in GPS, but they're in only certain streams. Uh jamming is easy. It's really easy to jam radio waves. You just broadcast lots of radio um and you just fill the spectrum. It's really easy. There is an active map GPS wise arrow which will show you active realtime spoofing jamming. So, it takes the ADSB data and maps it to where the plane really is uh and what their flight path is. And as you can see, there's a whole load here

over over over um uh Eastern Europe and there's a whole load down over the Middle East. It's quite a serious problem that's having quite an impact. So, we'll move on from uh this is if if you might have noticed the aliens change because I ran out of my credits on chat GPT, so I had to go to Gemini. Uh he it did a good job at trying to replicate it, but you know, there's some subtle differences. Um, so, so we've got CIA and then how do we fix stuff? So, the next one is patching because everybody has stuff they need patch on. I I'm a pentester in, you know, my day job. I constantly report on

things out of date, things that need patching for outdated libraries. There's nothing new about space. The first and furthest IT remote call so far from a from a human call, that's Alan Shepard on the moon. Um and again the moon landings did happen. Um so there was a fault code from the lander as it was released from the command module was released. So so the Apollo uh one had had different modules. It had a command module which actually landed on the moon and there was that get got released from the actual bit that orbited the moon where one astronaut would say there was a there were fault codes that came from that. as soon as

that would got released from the main one and it was assumed to be uh a dodgy solder joint. So they actually got Alan Shepard to go and put his finger on various different bits to see when the code where the dodgy solder joint was and then they sent him a literal patch that he could actually key in by hand to to just ignore that feeling and suppress the error codes. Voyager one, I don't know whether you saw this in 2024, it stopped responding. Um, and absolutely amazing, they sent a patch. Voyager 1 is at the far end of the solar system. It's practically left the solar system now. It is 23 light hours away. So that means if you send a

message to it, 23 light hours there, sorry, 23 hours there, 23 hours back. 46 hours between each response. It's not, you can't get a SSH term rule through that. Um, but it's patched. It was absolutely amazing. Whoever did that is a genius. The thing is though, all Voyager is is was done long ago that all its data is public. So your telecommunications are public, your actual software public, you can find the stack of actual, you know, the original source code for it. If you look hard enough, in theory, you can do it yourself. except for you need a really stupidly powerful telescope. This is one of the sites of uh of NASA's DSN, deep space

network. So yeah, uh good luck on that one. Uh nowadays we have cubats which um are are built basically they're open source satellites that you just plug boards in. Think of them as raspy pies in space. And you you uh I did a I designed one of these as part of my degree. Um and it was basically they don't care about the security. They don't care about the backbone. They just want to plug all their boards in um and and run that. So that they're all based on open source stuff. So there's obviously patches for that. Perseverance is a rover and it had the first um helicopter to fly on a foreign planet on Mars. I'm just going

to I know I'm running short on time. I'm just going to say how freaking amazing is that you had a helicopter fly on Mars. That should just down everybody in the room. Uh that is based on open source. Uh there was a badge released by GitHub of all the projects that that it used and I'm apologize for the color. Let's zoom in a bit. So log 4j has something known as log 4 shell. There is a remote code execution vulnerability on a helicopter on Mars. Uh space telescopes. I only got this in because this is in the title of my talk. Uh space telescopes were absolutely freaking amazing. You can see everything. This is gamma rays. This is

looking at a p pulsar that is parse billions of parexs away. A pulsar is basically a neutron star that's sent out magnetic uh it spins around really fast and sends out uh pulses of data that absolutely brilliant. You know, this is X-ray. This is the stuff we get as one. This is from the James Web Space Telescope. That is an exoplanet. So this is a planet in TWW7 which is quite a few light years away. We can see other planets around other stars. Now that is so amazing. Um this is this is all communicated with called NASA's JPL's deep space network which is based in Cal uh California, Madrid and Australia. So it can always communicate and goes and

downloads links everything. This is public information you can see there. uh somebody has done a paper on on exploring the security. I got really excited in Reddit and it's basically it's a documentation review that basically goes oh yes somebody could break in um though we did have interesting one is carry is a Korean uh space team uh so they transfer data to everybody and each one is individual and different so it's it's it's amazing how it how it is so there are potential risks there need somebody to look into it but it's a normal risk you get in a location Uh the future space is big. It's growing. Uh you got SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the UK Space

Trade Association. I just put those in just to have some UK. Um there are plans for looking at Cornwall Island man to try and do space industries. It's an active thing in the world. Uh that's the physical side of a nanostat. It weighs 2 kg. Uh price to to launch 2 kg at the moment is about $1,000. Um, and it will get down to about 20. And I've run out of time, so I've got two minutes. Right. So, it it it's so in theory, everybody in this room could launch a satellite. It's within individual cost. Uh, it's a bit more than that because there'll be agreements with SpaceX. This leads us to the next problem, which is space junk.

That is a current space junk tracker. Uh, that, see that red bit? That's mostly Space Links, the Starlink stuff de-orbiting. Uh, it's fine if it de orbits. It will burn up in the atmosphere, but if it doesn't, that's all stuff whizzing around that can hit somebody at fast relative speed relativity speeds. Um, and that's it basically. Sorry about that. Um, so yeah, any questions?

>> Oh, I can't use a question ball. We've got the mic ball here. This is great. Somebody ask a question just cuz I want to throw it. Nope. Okay. [laughter] I've obviously bored. Uh there you are. >> I just wanted the ball. >> Okay. There is actually a question at the back there. Do you want to pass? >> Um have there any has anybody hacked? Uh Defcon had the the NASA uh it was either NASA or Department of Defense had a hack the sack competition in Defcon for the past couple of years. Um it has in theory been done as in there was exploits there. Uh nobody's done it in real life. You wouldn't do it by

launching the space system and doing it like you do in the films. You you would do them with methods. [clears throat] Anybody else? I'm [snorts] going to have to go go quite loopy. though. Somebody catch and throw. Oh nearly. I'm too embarrassed to throw the ball. You talked about Oh, yeah. Hello. Uh, you talked about uh piracy affecting uh uh satellites. How does that differ with mid Earth orbit and uh geo earth orbit or the G1? Sorry. uh geocynchronous, it's a lot more power to actually reach. Um so yeah, it's it's likely you need bigger location so you'd be easier to track it. Basically, it's ball coming at the head. There's meant to be a relay of helpers

and they've all decided to hide. Uh anybody else? >> And then I think that's it then. Oh, >> very frivolous one. Uh, you said I don't show [laughter] Dustin. Um, you said you could launch your own space satellite. Um, what could you do with it? Could you like just be broadcasting an image or something like that? >> Uh, launch satellite, whatever you want. >> I was thinking you could go see in space just for shits and giggles. >> Uh, literally, yeah, most of it will be like scientific scientific information. >> So, stuff you can get from, you know, outside the atmosphere cuz the atmosphere is quite restricted what you can get through. How how would people

find it? Do you just have to give them sort of coordinates or something like that or is it just broadcast? >> Uh it's you don't need much power to get up that far. I mean, look at your GPS receiver. So, it's whatever you define. Awesome. So, ready? Right. I think that's it.