Hack The Planet! And Space Too: A Peek Into Satellite Hacking

alrighty hello everyone this is hack the planet and space two a very quick introduction to satellite hacking so i am rachel velasco and thank you so much for supporting visa charlotte this year so let's get started a little bit more about me every time i play among us i have one of the imposters without fail and the theme of this year's b-sides is what i learned in quarantine and unfortunately i was one of the many people whose mental health was greatly affected by the pandemic so my depression anxiety i've been struggling with those for several years now and it definitely works in my impostor syndrome within infosec and i couldn't find any joy with my work or with what i was learning

in school and i felt that i was constantly defending myself and having to explain why i belonged in infosec and eventually it got to the point where i thought it would be so much better if i just got ejected but anyway my uh treatment plan was revised and one of the first things that i got excited about in a long time that felt like a long time was i'm satellite hacking and i'm excuse me i am back to work now in school and i've taken up some leadership roles in some tech organizations and i'm definitely not an expert but i am very excited to share what i learned about hacking space with all of y'all

so let's go over the agenda i'll be discussing exactly what satellites are how you can go about attacking them and more resources for learning more on your own and getting some practice in so satellites but first i have some news in march of this year this article came out how space is becoming a lot more dangerous and the army space and missile defense commander he said that they have a lot of new tools like interceptors which is anti-missile weapons hypersonic missiles and directed energy weapons and he said it was pretty darn awesome yes that is super awesome however they are applying this technology to satellites and just a couple of months ago as of this recording

um russia conducted an anti-satellite weapons test but this anti-satellite weapon is on a satellite so these satellites are becoming more and more dangerous so why would you want to hack a satellite what even is a satellite well in this context an artificial satellite is any object that was intentionally placed into orbit and they have a lot of different purposes depending on what orbit they're on but for the most part there's communications navigation for science like weather monitoring and whatnot and for recon there are a lot of spy satellites up there right now so the orbits by altitude i'm only going to be talking about three but there are quite a lot of them and this first one is called the

low earth orbit and satellites here they they're generally for uh communications but you'll also find the international space station the hubble telescope and the us iridium communication satellite system and this requires the lowest amount of energy to deploy and keep in orbit next we have the medium earth orbit and there's a subclassification called semi-synchronous and what that means is it's consistent the satellites on this orbit pass the same two spots on the equator every single day and in medium earth orbit you'll tend to find a lot of the navigational satellites like gps and glonass which is i believe global navigation satellite system and finally the last one is not high earth orbit even though it is

considered an orbit but it is a geosynchronous orbit so geosynchronous means that um at the same time every day you will find the satellite at the same point in the sky excuse me and there's a special kind of geosynchronous satellite called geostationary and geostationary means that it doesn't matter what time of day you look up in the sky that satellite will always be in the same spot and of the geostationary satellites a lot of them will be commercial communications or broadcasting and since it's so high up they'll have a constant view of a large surface area from up there there's also the geostationary operational environmental satellites or the goes so a lot of these they they tend to function

uh like scientifically they have uh weather monitoring you can see all the hurricanes wildfires from up there and they can also detect distress signals from ships and planes so they're also very helpful with search and rescue and a little bit past the geostationary orbit is the graveyard orbit and this is where satellites go to die and all these defunct satellites that no longer serve their purpose or have broken and can't be fixed for some reason they end up becoming space debris and china tried solving this problem with an anti-satellite missile and it did hit the satellite that they were intending to hit but it just split into a bajillion more pieces and spread it out everywhere

so yes and there's also the problem of collisions there's the space debris and the still functional satellites not too long ago there was a defunct russian satellite that collided with a functioning u.s iridium satellite and they ended up um colliding yes and their debris went back to earth and so there's a lot of like radioactive material that they dumped and i think it landed in the u.s um so that's a giant problem with these uh defunct satellites colliding and there's also the issue of light pollution all of these satellites in orbit are blocking the view of other celestial bodies so scientists have been complaining about this now how do you go about attacking satellites there's this wonderful paper by the u.s

air force nasik called competing in space and there are a couple uh threats that they list to space systems so i'll be talking about the user and ground segment in one part and then the link segment and the space segment and if you noticed there are a lot of familiar terms because satellites are basically computers so what they call the signals that a satellite receives is the uplink the down link is the signals that the satellite sends down back to earth to ground stations and to phones and whatever other endpoints there are so what exactly is a ground station it's just a fancy radio station that communicates exclusively with a satellite and honestly it's just a fancy computer

and antenna combination so this would be the cheapest way to take over the satellite since you could just hack into it like you normally would a usual computer but unfortunately since it is a usual computer there are logs so there will be a trace of when you have like tried to interfere with this ground station and there was this instance back i believe it was 2008 there was the terra earth observation system satellite and nasa found that the responsible party achieved all steps required to command the satellite but did not issue commands so whoever hacked into this satellite they had control over it but they didn't issue any commands to like change its inclination or anything but this happened 10 years

ago so satellite hacking is not a new thing next we have the link segment so satellites have a communication payload module which have a transmitter receiver on it or a transponder they usually have a bandpass filter so this makes sure it it only allows frequencies within a certain range and they will also have a low noise amplifier because these signals tend to travel very long distances from the ground stations so it will amplify those signals and make sure they are heard and like with typical wireless attacks um satellite link segment attacks are um susceptible to spoofing replay attacks and eavesdropping there was a wonderful talk earlier um this year at defcon by james paver called whispers among the stars about

them eavesdropping on satellite communications and it was very cool but also very scary and finally we have jamming so there have been many instances of countries jamming each other's satellites and what jamming what makes jamming different from normal interference is that jamming is intentional so there have been times where the us has they have found iran jamming their gps satellites there's been issues with russia and china and all the usual people now this space segment can you physically hack a satellite that's in space yes you can slap a hardware implant on there but that requires a lot of money so this is normally uh reserved for nation state actors and bored billionaires but this is purely theoretical there's not a

lot that we know about it and it probably has happened but it's very highly classified so to recap the threats to satellites there is the grounding user component the link segment and the space segment so here are some more resources for learning more on your own there is this cool open source project called sat nags and it's a network of many ground stations are just made by average people and they have a crowdsource satellite info database and there's actually one fairly close to here i believe it's in weddington and that's station 642 and you can see all the satellites that it's been tracking it's very very cool and the aerospace village this year had nyansa

and this was a giant collaboration with the us air force and red balloon security and they had a build your own ground station kit for only a dollar so as you can imagine they sold out very very quickly but they do have all the parts listed on their website for building your own ground station with them and there's a lot of helpful info on their website still and finally we have a lot of simulation software from nasa there is 42 which is simulating altitude and trajectory dynamics there is a lot of math involved with hacking satellites which i definitely will not go into but um 42 is very helpful with determining the math you need for hacking a satellite since

you have to be able to see them to hack it and there is also uh nas cubed the nasa operational simulator for small satellites and there is also this very cool project called the cubesat sim project and a cubesat is a very very tiny simulator it's or sorry a very tiny satellite and it only weighs a couple pounds so there are quite a lot of them um up in orbit right now and i actually got to build my own as well and it is sitting in my closet unfortunately but yes it's fairly cheap all the parts together are less than a hundred dollars to build your own so i highly recommend uh building your own cubesat sim

so some more organizations to learn from highly recommend the aerospace village they have all of their talks and workshops from this year's defcon on their youtube channel there's also the defense digital service they they were the ones who ran the hackasat competition at defcon this year and finally the library space foundation they are a big organization they have many open source projects like the satnags they also have the upsat cubesat and pocket cube satellites that you can build on your own so there's a lot of cool documentation on their website and i highly suggest checking them out so thank you very much i am rachel velasco and please let me know if you have any

questions i will definitely do my best to answer them but again i am not an expert but yes hack the planet in space