Don't Look Up: There Are Sensitive Internal Links in the Clear on GEO Satellites by Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger, Aaron Schulman ISBN 10.1145/3719027.3765198 instant download

Don't Look Up: There Are Sensitive Internal Links in the Clear on GEO Satellites by Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger, Aaron Schulman ISBN 10.1145/3719027.3765198 instant download

Geosynchronous (GEO) satellite links provide IP backhaul to remote critical infrastructure for utilities, telecom, government, military, and commercial users. To date, academic studies of GEO infrastruc- ture have focused on a handful of satellites and specific use cases. We perform the first broad scan of IP traffic on 39 GEO satellites across 25 distinct longitudes with 411 transponders using consumer- grade equipment. We overcome the poor signal quality plaguing prior work and build the first general parser that can handle the diverse protocols in use by heterogeneous endpoints. We found 50% of GEO links contained cleartext IP traffic; while link-layer encryption has been standard practice in satellite TV for decades, IP links typically lacked encryption at both the link and network layers. This gives us a unique view into the internal network se- curity practices of these organizations. We observed unencrypted cellular backhaul traffic from several providers including cleartext call and text contents, job scheduling and industrial control sys- tems for utility infrastructure, military asset tracking, inventory management for global retail stores, and in-flight wifi.