6 ms·
Eh low threat hack. Requires physical access to dish and installs piece of easily identifiable hardware. Tbh give unfettered access to most hardware and you can
by gtvwill 4y ago
Eh low threat hack. Requires physical access to dish and installs piece of easily identifiable hardware. Tbh give unfettered access to most hardware and you can hack it.
- yarg 4y agoThe terminal is used to contact the constellation as well as Starlink's backend servers. If the remote machines have the assumption of trustworthy terminals baked in, then this isn't a low threat hack.
- sneak 4y ago> If the remote machines have the assumption of trustworthy terminals baked in, Given the general competence level of the engineering at SpaceX, I would not put any money on this being true. Maybe if the system were designed by Sony...
- yarg 4y agoI know it's somewhat unlikely, but I was replying to someone who couldn't even see the potential value of a hacked terminal as the entry point to an attack chain.
- sebastialonso 4y agoYou are completely right about the potential magnitude of the hack, but my first approach was purely as an individual consumer, this doesn't affect me. Seeing this as an engineer...yikes
- GuB-42 4y agoEven Sony doesn't considers its terminals trustworthy. They really don't want you to root your PlayStation, but that's mostly because it allows you to hack offline games. Hacked consoles are usually banned pretty quickly from online services. It doesn't mean Sony has the best track record when it comes to security just that they are not completely clueless.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoWhen I worked at SpaceX, lots of software folk used an internal IRC server. One time I created a chatbot that would execute arbitrary python commands on my workstation. Knowing that coworkers would maliciously try to pwn my computer, I ran it in a chroot with very restricted permissions. It took about 20 minutes for someone to figure out how to fork bomb it hard enough to lock up my system. Another time as a team building activity, we were using mission control and backup mission control to play a multiplayer space ship bridge simulator game. My team was winning, up until our terminals started failing. Someone on the other team had credentials to the IT system, and was remotely rebooting them.
- a_t48 4y agoIf alls fair in love and war, at that point I’d start yanking power cables in response. ;)
- zeristor 4y agoKobayashi Maru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
- solarkraft 4y agoSounds like a fun time and good consistent reminder that malicious actors can be everywhere :-) (That said I'd be pissed)
- mnahkies 4y agoI was a big fan of modded playstation portables back in the day, to do it you would take a particular model of battery and remove one terminal or something similar which would activate a debug mode that let you flash it. They fixed that with the newer batteries as I recall but was a pretty big hole at release
- Roby65 4y agoAh, the old and beautiful Pandora battery. It was magic, you could recover every bricked PSP with it, i hate that no other device can do something like that.
- lostsock 4y agoNo need to speculate: "We will happily ship a Starlink kit to any customer that purchases one. With Starlink kits all over the world, we don't have much control over what users do to them. History shows us that it's hard (and maybe impossible) to make devices completely resilient to persistent attackers with unrestricted physical access – the attacker just has too much power when they have infinite time to modify the hardware. In the limit they could always just build their own user device from scratch, though we know from experience that it's pretty hard to do so. Ultimately, the only way for us to build a secure system is to assume that attackers will eventually get into the Starlink kit, and add additional layers of defense-in-depth to protect our network and the other users within it. Other parts of the Starlink network, like satellites, might be more difficult for a consumer to get their hands on, but similarly are built with layers of defense. To provide these additional layers of protection, there are a number of security properties that we believe are important both in the Starlink kit and in the rest of the system" From https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkWelcomesSecurityResearchersBringOnTheBugs.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkWelcomesSecuri...
- TrueDuality 4y agoThe value of this attack isn't breaking into the terminal itself, but that it allows the end user to modify the control channel to the satellite. It allows internal inspection of the protocols, authentication, data formats, etc between the terminal and the satellite itself. I assume that the actual received and transmitted packets from the terminal are encrypted so "outside in" inspection is very very difficult.
- c7DJTLrn 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle
- londons_explore 4y agoThese are all things I would expect to have access to if I had purchased the dish. This hack just gives the user access to what they should always have had access to.
- 8note 4y agoAren't these dishes stored outside?