Some of the stuff that was extracted from the unencrypted traffic in the link:

- 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.

• feraloink

  today at 9:21 AM

  In https://satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/ Has The Issue Been Fixed section:

  >we re-scanned with their permission and were able to verify a remedy had been deployed: T-Mobile, WalMart, and KPU.

  The fact that critical infrastructure (e.g. utility companies using satellite links for remote-operated SCADA) was exposed is really scary too.

• zelos

  today at 6:51 AM

  > Real-time military object telemetry with precise geolocation, identifiers, and live telemetry

  Oops

  • NoiseBert69

    today at 8:39 AM

    Pulls out the bamboo whip

    Another round of OpSec training

• alfiedotwtf

  today at 7:53 AM

  > This is insane!

  Not as insane as it was in the early 2000s…

  > while link-layer encryption has been standard practice in satellite TV for decades

  Before Snowden, I would say 99% of ALL TCP traffic I saw on satellites was in unadulterated plain-text. Web and email mostly.

  … the pipe was so fast, you could only pcap if you had a SCSI hard drive!

• CGMthrowaway

  today at 5:04 AM

  Is there a git repo that lets one read this stuff in real time yet?

As with anything in life, when it's what you know and do on the regular, that simple thing can look like magic to others. I met an old timer in the satellite business that came out to help install our receiver for a new TV channel the company I was at was getting off the ground. He found out what bird we were using and what its slot was. Based on that, he knew how many satellites over from the satellite he knew and used as his base. It was a long time running TV channel that he could find very quickly. Once that bird was located, he just manually (literally pushed the dish with his hand) counting the number of satellites that came in/out of view until he landed on "our" bird. Once there, connected our receiver and baddaboom baddabing, there it was. Once the satellite was pointed at the proper angle to the south, it took less than five minutes from him connecting his receiver to verify his base signal to packing up and heading off the roof.

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.

• stavros

  today at 8:17 AM

  Eh I kind of feel like you can't say that. If something is magical before you learn how it's done, it should be magical after. The magical part isn't "it's actually impossible", but "it's so far from what I could come up on my own", which still holds after you know the secret.

  • lxgr

    today at 9:42 AM

    Yes, some excellent magic tricks work even better when you know how they work, especially if they’re the kind that’s based on putting in ridiculous amounts of work or skill/practice.

    Penn and Teller play a lot with that idea, for example.

Had a vendor offer a customer of mine a huge discount if they purchased radios without the encryption license in the year of our lord 2024.

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.

• tgsovlerkhgsel

  today at 4:36 AM

  > My bet is that in space there would be a noticable increase in heat/energy if they did encryption by default.

  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).

  • lxgr

    today at 9:44 AM

    Exactly, and the little bit of data actually destined for satellites – which includes momentum wheel and booster control – is something you’ll definitely want to at least authenticate.

    I believe that’s one of the few things that even amateur radio operators are allowed to encrypt for that reason.

• ryandrake

  today at 3:31 AM

  Likely no consequences to the decision-makers for data exfiltration or other shenanigans happening, so there's nothing motivating a behavior change.

  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!"

  • devjab

    today at 5:33 AM

    Who do you imagine will get fired? The CISO who's been recommending various security imporvements and been trying to get them implemented, but been unable to do so due to a lack of C level interest in IT. Or the C level's who lack interest in IT security until it bites them in the investor?

    At least here in the EU we're moving toward personal responsibility for C level's who don't take IT and OT security serious in critical sectors, but in my anecdotal experience that is the first time anything regarding security has actually made decision makers take it serious. A lot of it is still just bureaucracy though. We have a DORA and NIS2 compliant piece of OT that is technically completely insecure but is compliant because we've written a detailed plan on how to make it secure.

  • chii

    today at 3:40 AM

    > nobody gets fired when there's a breach

    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).

    • ozim

      today at 5:42 AM

      If you fire people for stuff they didn’t maliciously introduced you will end up with no people to work with.

      Imagine jailing doctors for every patient that died you would be out of doctors quite soon.

      • necovek

        today at 6:29 AM

        The legal system already has sufficient cop-out: for anything that you should have been aware of, or would have been informed about.

        Eg. doctors do get sued and fired for malpractice, if they did something no other skilled doctor would reasonably do ("let's just use the instruments from the previous surgery").

      • nkrisc

        today at 8:42 AM

        If the doctor is criminally negligent they could be jailed.

        • ozim

          today at 9:33 AM

          That's kind of obvious, I didn't think it has to be spelled out.

    • protocolture

      today at 4:25 AM

      >this must mean the consequences of such a breach has either not produced any visible damage

      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.

    • josephg

      today at 3:44 AM

      End user license agreements are a huge part of the problem. Ideally users could sue if our data is leaked - and the threat of being sued would put pressure on companies to take security more seriously. Ie, it would become a business concern.

      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.

      • astrange

        today at 4:00 AM

        There is in at least California, the EU, and China. A lot of clauses in EULAs aren't actually legal.

        • devjab

          today at 5:39 AM

          On the other hand you can't sue a company for losing your data in many EU companies. You can report them to whatever data protection agency your country has, and after an investigation they can fine, and/or, in more serious cases turn the matter over to the police for a criminal investigation.

          The disadvantage of this is that the local data protection agencies haven't been handing out very big fines. Sometimes that's due to company law. In my country you'd fine the owning company, which in many cases will be a holding company. Since fine sizes are linked to revenue and a holding company typically has no revenue, this means fines are often ridicilously small.

    • ryandrake

      today at 3:41 AM

      Or, the entity being damaged is not the decision maker and has no power to hold the decision maker responsible.

    • lmm

      today at 3:47 AM

      Or the damage is diffuse whereas the costs of preventing the breach would be concentrated. Or the connection between the damage and the breach is difficult to prove.

  • notmyjob

    today at 5:38 AM

    That and h1b abuse.

• feraloink

  today at 8:41 AM

  The landing page has a Q&A. This is the relevant part of the response to the question, "Why aren't all GEO satellite links encrypted?"

  >Encryption imposes additional overhead to an already limited bandwidth, decryption hardware may exceed the power budget of remote, off-grid receivers, and satellite terminal vendors can charge additional license fees for enabling link-layer encryption. In addition, encryption makes it harder to troubleshoot network issues and can degrade the reliability of emergency services.

  So, the only suggestion that there would be greater heat/energy if they did encryption by default is the part about decryption (receiver) hardware having limited power budgets in some cases. There's more than what I copy-and-pasted above, but the overall message is that lots of organizations haven't wanted to pay the direct costs of enabling encryption... although they should.

  EDIT: Link to Q&A https://satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/#qanda

  • lambdaone

    today at 9:31 AM

    It's not a spacecraft issue. Encryption can be done at the ground stations, and mandated as part of the standards for interfsce equipment, just like with DOCSIS. There's nothing, physically, to stop you passing unencrypted traffic down your DOCSIS cable, if you wanted to make a nonstandard modem and send unencrypted traffic on your local physical segment of the network. But the rest of the network will refuse to talk to it.

    The same could have easily been mandated for satellite links - no encryption, your packet won't get forwarded to the internet at the ground station, and any packets sent to you from the internet will be sent to you encrypted. And all this can be implementd without needing to touch the satellite itself, which will continue to forward what it sees as unencrypted traffic without any design changes. It could even have been implemented incrementally on existing running services, with old and new equipment working side-by-side, but all new ground stations required to support encryption, and with a sunset date for old equipment, and a rolling upgrade program.

    DOCSIS got this right in 1999; the satellite industry has had 25 yeqrs to catch up.

• mjevans

  today at 3:57 AM

  Why does Space need to decrypt a vast majority of the traffic? Flow can be just as brick not-smart as fiber optic cables under the sea.

  Now, management, control, etc? Yeah those you need to decode in orbit.

  • JumpCrisscross

    today at 6:50 AM

    > Flow can be just as brick not-smart as fiber optic cables under the sea

    Wouldn't this still leak metadata for routing?

    • etiennebausson

      today at 8:12 AM

      It would not be perfect, but it wouldn't be purposefully shooting oneself in the foot.

• dooglius

  today at 3:58 AM

  The encryption of the payload doesn't need to take place on the satellites

  • protocolture

    today at 4:20 AM

    Thats very true.

• astrange

  today at 3:59 AM

  Encryption is basically free as far as I know, but it is more complex and it must be hard to get software updates up there.

  • fransje26

    today at 8:33 AM

    Here is their excuse:

    > Panasonic told us that enabling encryption could incur a 20–30% capacity loss. In addition, when using IPsec, ESP and IP headers can introduce 20–30 bytes of overhead, which is nontrivial for small-packet applications like VoIP and video calls

  • trenchpilgrim

    today at 4:30 AM

    It is almost free on modern CPUs that have hardware acceleration, yea

    • 15155

      today at 5:19 AM

      Space-faring electronics aren't exactly cost-sensitive - the cost of a cluster of crypto-accelerated CPUs or rad-hardened FPGAs is peanuts compared to the human and launch costs that go into these satellites.

      • blackoil

        today at 7:35 AM

        Issue is the satellite was launched 10 years ago with 20-year-old tech. So, calculations of today may not be applicable on them.

    • tgsovlerkhgsel

      today at 4:38 AM

      Wireguard uses ChaCha20, which to my knowledge neither has nor requires HW acceleration to be fast.

• XorNot

  today at 7:26 AM

  I mean a bunch of those crypto systems turn out to be flawed though. So skipping the vendor implementation and using something in software instead could make sense.

I was working in space industry and ECSS security guidelines are missleading grant seeking startups to try to reinvent TLS on orbit. There are to mamy bureaucracy. ECSS guidelines for software teams were created by people who never written a Hello World in their life, just look at specs of ECSS Packet Utilisation Service, it's a joke, that's why I prefer to work for VC funded companies than grant funded.

Absolutely mind-boggling that this is a thing; not just that satellite links aren't per-user link-encrypted, but also that people are still using unencrypted protocols to exchange sensitive information on the public internet in 2025.

Section 6.3.2 is an eye-opener... good lord... Gets even worse at 6.4.2-3

• Arrath

  today at 8:56 AM

  Am I offtrack in wondering if by reverse engineering the mentioned in-the-clear ATM communications you could (in theory) inject some malicious packets and in effect just dispense cash to yourself with a laptop and a dish? How very cyberpunk.

• lambdaone

  today at 3:30 AM

  It's absolutely jaw-dropping. Either no-one at these companies was capable of understanding the problem, or no-one cared enough to do something about it.

  • yujzgzc

    today at 5:13 AM

    From my time in similar companies, some people understand, and might care, but aren't empowered to do anything about it. They've got a job to do, and creatively auditing network security isn't it. Finding this kind of issue on the company clock won't get them promoted, on the contrary they'll look like they're slowing the team down with vulnerabilities to fix when they've got stuff to build and sell. Very poor security culture.

  • throwing_away

    today at 4:16 AM

    Likely both.

Is it correct to Assuming the amount of Mexican companies in this paper is because of their receiver being in the major city southwestmost corner of the country ?

• fennec-posix

  today at 3:34 AM

  Yeah that's correct. The study was conducted in San Diego which falls under the satellite beam footprint required for services in Mexico.

  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.

  • dylan604

    today at 3:47 AM

    > wink wink

    location location location is an apt phrase for more than just real estate

  • N19PEDL2

    today at 6:14 AM

    And if you were in Harrogate, UK (more winks), you’d be in the footprint of satellites servicing Europe.

  • bediger4000

    today at 3:53 AM

    I'm not so good at hints. Are you gesturing at the NSA facility at Pine Gap?

    • mike_d

      today at 7:04 AM

      Yes they are trying to be cheeky, but missing the mark.

      Pine Gap is a large facility for collecting data coming down from our own satellites.

      Foreign satellite collection in Australia happens at two other facilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoal_Bay_Receiving_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Defence_Satellite_C...

• jf

  today at 3:19 AM

  That’s my interpretation

Website: https://satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/

Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/satellites-are-leaking-the-world...

Does anyone remember the days when you pointed a 60cm antenna at the Hispasat 30W and connected your DVB-S2 tuner in Windows, Using Crazycat's BDADataEx, you tuned an IP data transponder. Using a technique called Satfish (with a software I don't remember), some files were reconstructed, usually vsat data from oil platforms... and porn.

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

• today at 6:38 AM

Who needs hackers when companies broadcast their secrets to half the planet?

I wonder why the DOI link on the bottom left of the first page does not work:

https://doi.org/10.1145/3719027.3765198

• xucheng

  today at 6:46 AM

  It’s quite common for a DOI to be assigned to a paper after it’s accepted during camera ready. However, the DOI won’t work until the conference or journal version is published on the official website (ACM in this case). The version you’re viewing now is simply a preprint directly from the authors.

  • feraloink

    today at 8:52 AM

    Exactly! It says this as one of the 3 reasons for DOIs not found on the error page:

    >The DOI has not been activated yet.

I see no issue with the satellite backhaul itself being unencrypted; anyone using the satellite provider should assume they're hostile and encrypt+authenticate everything they send anyway. I don't trust my ISP's fiber to be snoop-resistant just because they nominally have some shitty ONT encryption.

Obviously the specific examples of end-users failing to encrypt are bad, but that's not really a problem with the satellites.

• varenc

  today at 4:41 AM

  If someone is browsing the internet on in-flight wifi, and their DNS requests get leaked this way, I don't really think its the casual airline user's fault for not encrypting their DNS traffic. Modern cell phone data traffic (4G/5G) is all encrypted, so the same unencrypted DNS requests can't just be passively sniffed. Something similar should happen here.

  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.

  • jeffrallen

    today at 5:38 AM

    It is the fault of the end user software not protecting them. This is why we have encrypted SNI (promoted by Cloidflare, for example).

    • mike_d

      today at 7:06 AM

      I don't know if you've ever tried to actually use in flight wifi, but any traffic not subject to inspection is heavily throttled to the point of being unusable.

      ESNI is also a technology in search of a problem. It does not provide any meaningful security benefits.

• jeffrallen

  today at 5:40 AM

  This. Bytes on every medium can be snooped. Internetworking means that your bytes go on mediums you don't know about and don't control. There's no such thing as a link where encryption is not needed, except localhost.

> remarkably, nearly all the end-user consumer Internet browsing and app traffic we observed used TLS or QUIC

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.

• the8472

  today at 9:27 AM

  It has improved security, but it has made it less durable. Hosts now need constant maintenance to keep up with changes to TLS policies, certificate renewal protocols and so on.

• vasco

  today at 4:43 AM

  It was only successful because Google said you'd rank higher if you did it.

  • yujzgzc

    today at 5:07 AM

    It was only successful because of Let's Encrypt removing any excuse for not having HTTPS on your website, HSTS becoming a thing, and Chrome moving from gentle inducements (that cute green padlock) to nasty looking warnings if you didn't use encryption.

    • vasco

      today at 8:01 AM

      No, that was after, and it made it easy, but before google many people said there was no point "because their site wasnt sensitive". Those people didn't care about let's encrypt or how easy it was, they just didn't find a reason to do it. Google gave them a monetary reason to do it.

  • stephen_g

    today at 5:41 AM

    Which in-turn was driven by the Snowden revelations of what the NSA was doing in terms of mass surveillance.

• mike_d

  today at 7:12 AM

  > I'm glad it was ultimately successful.

  What are you talking about? It was an absolute failure.

  As soon as we got widespread TLS adoption, Cloudflare magically came along and wooed all the nerds into handing over all the plaintext traffic to a single company.