While the addition of being in orbit, and so truly inaccessible if you lose comms, adds a slight wrinkle these are in most other ways just another piece of infr

While the addition of being in orbit, and so truly inaccessible if you lose comms, adds a slight wrinkle these are in most other ways just another piece of infrastructure connected to the internet, and so securing them is probably done in much the same way. I guess the closest equivalent here is a remote point of presence for an ISP, which is also unlikely to be staffed on a regular basis. The first step is physical security, ensuring no one can get their hands on the hardware itself… that one’s pretty much in the bag here. With that out of the way, we then look at the communications channel. This is probably the greatest vulnerability Starlink has, since if you can target the satellite with a powerful enough transmitter you can hypothetically block anyone else communicating with it. I’d be curious to hear if there are any specific defences against that built into Starlink. As another poster mentioned though, you’re only going to be able to do that to a given satellite for a short period before it crosses the horizon, so this is mostly a case of being able to deny service in a specific region of the world. Next up is remote access. Again, curious to hear otherwise, but there’s probably a couple of control channels here. The satellites are probably running an SSH server, but I’d be surprised if that’s exposed to the public internet, so you’d need to breach whatever VPN or equivalent SpaceX use to communicate with the satellites. In this regard they’re just another computer, apply whatever methods you’d usually apply. They also likely have a channel via which they’re listening for instructions to update their configuration. In that regard, these are IoT devices, it’s just that instead of receiving instructions to turn on a light bulb, they get instructions to fire rockets and change their orbit. My hunch here is that the primary comms channel for this is going to be the same as the SSH server, but there may well be a direct radio link they can use to recover if IP connectivity is lost. That’s probably the weak point if you want to hack a satellite, but it’ll be encrypted in some manner, and need authentication. Just finding out how that works will be a needle in a haystack because you’d have to intercept the traffic to start analysis. Or get physical access. Maybe you could contract SpaceX to give you a lift up?