Information security in space. What could happen if satellite system developers ignore cyber threats
Modern life would be impossible without satellites in orbit. We rarely notice them, but if someone hacks and disables the space navigation systems GPS and GLONASS, it will cause a real catastrophe on Earth. Navigation in smartphones will stop working, ships at sea will lose their “road”, carriers will not be able to record routes, the ability to set the exact time will disappear – and this is very important for financiers, scientists, the military and some enterprises.
My name is Sasha, I work in special projects at MTS Digital, and space exploration is my pet project. Today we will discuss how attackers can hack satellites and how to protect against this.
Is the impossible possible?
In the previous post, we talked about a large-scale hack of Viasat user infrastructure. But is it possible to attack the satellites themselves, since they are so far away and high? Spoiler alert: alas, but it is possible.
In 2023, Johannes Willbold of the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, became concerned about the low level of information security of satellites. If you set your mind to it, you can assemble a ground terminal for communicating with satellites for about $10,000 and try to intercept control of them.
Willbold studied three types of relatively simple devices:
a small cubesat ESTCube-1, launched by Estonia in 2013;
the larger OPS-SAT cubesat, operated by the European Space Agency;
The 120-kilogram Flying Laptop satellite, operated by the Institute of Space Systems at the University of Stuttgart.
Then he tried to establish a connection and intercept the satellite control functions, blocking the operators. Everything worked: the devices did not have authentication protocols, and they transmit their data without encryption. Only Flying Laptop was somehow protected, but it was possible to deal with it.
The researcher said that only two of the satellite developers mentioned above had conducted pentesting. The problem is the separation of space exploration and regular cyberspace. Organizations take the protection of ground-based communications systems seriously and turn to specialized experts, but many satellite developers do not have special skills in cybersecurity.
In addition, the larger the satellite, the easier it is to hack. Such devices are equipped with a large number of standard modules and commercial components. Each of them is potentially vulnerable, and this reduces the overall security of the device: if one component is hacked, the attacker will most likely be able to gain access to the spacecraft. Nothing can be done about it: satellites that have been launched are almost not subject to upgrade. Only new systems can improve their security.
“The reality is that these systems are built with very little overhead. They have budgeted for every milliwatt of power that is used to operate the satellite, so there is no overhead in the existing systems to run authentication or encryption systems.”— the researcher explains.
Vulnerability in Space – Disaster on Earth?
Gregory Falco of Johns Hopkins University in 2024 statedthat software for satellites more serious than the aforementioned CubeSats may not be written with secure development principles in mind. Often, legacy code is used, and the programs are written by engineers who care about the devices performing their functions, rather than professional software developers who follow DevSecOps.
More serious devices are not only satellites of global navigation systems, but also groups of spacecraft for remote sensing of the Earth. In addition to obvious military tasks, they allow scientists to predict the weather, track changes in the environment in real time, monitor natural disasters. Logistics, agriculture and much more depend on them. If something happens to such satellites, threats will arise: in the moment – unpredictability of natural phenomena, then – crop failures and so on. Ultimately, the economy will suffer on a global level.
It is not necessary to turn off the satellite to expose us to the mentioned threats. The topic of “bookmarks” in the form of unreliable components was included in top 10 dangers for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This also works for satellites. An attacker can gain access to the production of spacecraft components by introducing a hardware module or code element that will open a channel for communication with the satellite.
Having gained access to the satellite or communication channel, an attacker can distort the transmitted data. Ground services will receive inaccurate information about the state of the atmosphere, the temperature of a region or water – and therefore miss the approach of a hurricane or raise a false alarm about a non-existent forest fire. A more exotic option is distortion of data from a Mars rover. This can lead to an erroneous interpretation of data, for example, about the concentration of water ice in a certain region. Then the expensive expedition to Mars will not fulfill its tasks – simply because there will be no water at the landing site.
If you turn on the paranoid mode, you can cause panic on Earth. For example, by simulating alien transmissions in the communication channel of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) – a non-profit organization trying to detect signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. The consequences are unpredictable – from social phenomena in the spirit of mass riots to global changes in financial markets.
What's next?
It is clear that humanity has many “safety mechanisms”: information from one satellite will be checked by another, the landing site of a manned expedition will be checked by several automatic missions, and so on. But we cannot predict all hacking scenarios and exploitation of vulnerabilities.
Fraudsters are changing their tactics and approaches. For example, 20 years ago a thief could only sell your phone. 10 years ago he would send a message to contacts asking to transfer money. And now he is more interested in your online banks.
It's time to decide whether humanity wants to wait for a global cyberattack on spacecraft, or make information security measures for satellites as mandatory as for commercial software. It is clear that this will entail additional costs, but we will not lose our achievements in the use of space in an information apocalypse.
