18 hours ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575391
5 hours ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575391 - Oct 2025 (138 comments)
17 hours ago
Seems very odd to list HTTPS. Intercepting traffic which is only encrypted at a different network layer, is not in any meaningful way intercepting unencrypted traffic.
16 hours ago
HTTPS still exposes hostnames in most cases, so you can get a gist of wat someone is doing on the internet even if you can't see the exact contents.
The unencrypted transmissions (SMS, phone calls) are much more interesting to listen in on, of course.
11 hours ago
A director of the NSA once said something like "we launch missiles based on metadata alone."
9 hours ago
"We kill people based on metadata" Michael Haydon
Had to look that up.
7 hours ago
Now they're killing people based on language models. It always cracks me up that the big worry with available AI is that people will somehow use it to manipulate other people on the internet; meanwhile, the government has turned it into an assassination tool.
7 hours ago
While AI language models can emulate legal and judicial language, they are not sufficient substitutes for Due Process of Law because they have a comparably unacceptable wrongful conviction rate given that there are "hallucinations" and false citations.
6 hours ago
I’m aware of rumors about Israel using AI in war, but where are you hearing of it being used in legal and judicial settings? Besides a few lawyers getting caught and sanctioned, I don’t think it’s happening much.
7 hours ago
But they are doing it in secret.
"Due process be damned" is the apparent attitude
6 hours ago
Because manipulating billions of people a year is worse than assassinating 500 a year? Doesn't seem hard to figure out.
11 hours ago
Hostnames, IP addresses and maybe occasionally an HTTP connection that lets you tie all that metadata to an actual human identity.
8 hours ago
This reminds me of what happened decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_receive-only
tl;dr: Satellite TV signals were originally unencrypted and one would watch TV for free with a suitable receiver, but the broadcasters didn't like that, resulting in them eventually being encrypted.
6 days ago
I’m not sure where the novelty is in this research. It’s basically reporting something that has been universally known for decades.
11 hours ago
By next year encryption will be vastly more prevalent across geostationary satellite links, and it will be entirely due to this research (the actual mechanism being “everyone who ‘knew’ this internally now being empowered to fix it, rather than uselessly ‘know’ it, because now it’s public and newsworthy and embarrassing.”)
I’ll let other people comment on the actual novel elements of the research, because those exist too. But I want to point out that some huge portion of the value of public security research is really “intellectual garbage pickup”: calling out bad technical debt that “everyone knew about” and turning it into actionable security upgrades. Security research is a good part of the reason it’s mostly safe to browse the web on public Internet connections, when it wasn’t a decade ago.
PS As someone who is very cynical about security deployment, even I thought cellular network backhauls would all be encrypted as a matter of course by now, at least in the US.
8 hours ago
What makes this paper so unique, compared with the dozens of others that have preceded it (and attracted coverage in the tech media) over that past 20 years that it is going to drive such rapid change?
Black Hat, DEF CON etc seem to have a presentation just about every year that can be summarised as “DVB-S is fair game if you have a few hundred bucks and a quiet afternoon.”
Here’s a decent history of the state of play up to 2009. The authors recognised back then that this is already ground well covered.
http://archive.hack.lu/2009/Playing%20with%20SAT%201.2%20-%2...
And more of the same from 2020.
https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20M...
Then you’ve got coverage of the cool applications of this property of VSAT hops, such as the Russian intelligence services using it as a malware exfiltration vector.
6 hours ago
I know the authors so I’m aware of the intense amount of responsible disclosure they’ve been doing, and the very substantial behind-the-scenes impact this is having. So maybe the difference is the scope of this, the number of protocols and vendors they were able to detect and attack in one go, and also the way they’re approaching disclosure. In other words they’re being much more systematic in every aspect of the research, disclosure and re-analysis. I expect some people won’t take seriously and there will be more papers in the future.
I mean another way to put this is: maybe there’s a problem if you can say “there’s loads of previous work” and yet massive and systemic problems still exist. Where that problem is (holistic nature of the research or the disclosure process) is probably something you could drill down into. But you’ve basically admitted the previous research didn’t do the job, so all we’re doing is haggling about the price.
5 hours ago
>But you’ve basically admitted the previous research didn’t do the job, so all we’re doing is haggling about the price.
it's a poor metric -- research doesn't exist to drive policy, but it does aid in decision making.
There are global policies around the world that make no damn sense from even a basic scientific understanding, with little to no research done.
If some research is done, a policy maker is pointed at it, and the only response is a shoulder-shrug you don't shit-can the research and do it over -- you appoint vocal political types to campaign on the existing research.
3 hours ago
I’ve been involved in research that lead to major changes in TLS deployments across the Internet and so I can tell you that (1) research absolute can and should be structured to drive security improvements! You’re crazy if you think that isn’t an important goal. And (2) the way you structure, identify and disclose findings matters a lot when considering how well you achieve this goal.
Just to give an example of effective change-driving work: I would argue that persistent efforts via tools like Shodan and Censys have done a huge amount to clean up the Internet, at least as compared to one-off research efforts followed by “appoint activists to do the rest.” The reason is that companies respond to persistent measurement campaigns in a way that they don’t respond to one-off PR dings.
Most of the research you cite is pretty obscure and you’d have to search for it. Most of it didn’t get a lot of follow-up. When some of the firms with unencrypted backhauls were contacted by the current researchers, they didn’t even know that their backhauls were unencrypted. Finding and communicating this stuff, then following up on it relentlessly is the difference between “we knew and nobody did anything” and “it got fixed.”
Also don’t think for a second the vocal political types can do this work without constant communication from researchers who are willing to continue this work over a period of years.
12 hours ago
The paper seems to highlight that the novelty is in their general parser that worked across 39 different GEO satellites, and that it works with a couple hundred dollars of consumer grade equipment. From the paper:
"Our technical contributions include:
(1) We introduce a new method to self-align a motorized dish to improve signal quality. Specifically, we could receive IP traffic from 14.3% of all global Ku-band satellites from a single location with high signal quality and low error rate.
(2) We developed a general GEO traffic parser that can blindly decode IP packets from seven different protocol stacks that we observed in our scans. Five of these stacks have never been reported in any public research we are aware of."
19 hours ago
Universally known to whoever wanted to intercept that traffic.
Maybe and hopefully not known to the staff of those networks (the current staff could be maintaining what somebody else set up) as some of those companies fixed the problem when contacted by the researchers.
For sure not known to me and a lot of other people. I believed that everything in digital streams was encrypted. Ok, those ATM connections are probably tech from the 90s, but they probably had upgrades in part because of regulations. Privacy, security, nothing?
18 hours ago
It's an interesting problem. The reality is that for any decently-sized business people don't really know their networks. Their assumptions are sane, but often simply incorrect. I've heard a lot of people say things like "well the traffic is not going externally, so it's fine to leave it unencrypted." It's a bold, and almost always unchecked assumption.
8 hours ago
It doesn't help that practising even reasonable security comes at such a cost many orgs find reasons to not justify doing it - we've spent decades creating systems that are difficult to secure at every level and hand waving it away and now it's a wobbly jenga tower of systems.
12 hours ago
Even when the assumptions are correct, you’re depending on people doing their jobs correctly.
Over the years, I’ve found shockingly bad failures, usually on areas of internal networks where there is ambiguity as to what internal org is responsible. In old companies with data centers and cloud, there’s often pretty bad gaps.
13 hours ago
Define “known.” To those of us who have only heard rumors, it’s good validation.
8 hours ago
In this case, well-publicised in research presented at major conferences, and in associated media reporting over multiple decades.
7 hours ago
It’s also known that things get better over decades even if problems have been reported in the past, so it’s good information here showing that the problems are not yet fixed.
17 hours ago
Correct, this is why HTTPS (and encryption in general over the network) has become so popular. This property of traffic being intercepteable is also present in cable traffic as well, it's not hard to intercept traffic, you just find a tap, plug in a cable and observe, it's not even obviously illegal, there are many legitimate reasons to plug in a cable in a tap in the public, so there's a lot of possible alibis.
13 hours ago
Unlike wired traffic, you're blasting this all over a huge patch of ground that's possibly as large as 1/3 the surface of the earth.
You could be getting listened to from anywhere.