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I don't know that I'd extrapolate much from the insecurity of cubesats being run by university research teams to commercial satellites. There is already another

I don't know that I'd extrapolate much from the insecurity of cubesats being run by university research teams to commercial satellites. There is already another person here claiming they worked on these and they have better security. I worked for the NRO for a long time and there is no way in hell anybody was ever going to hack any of the US spy satellites or GPS satellites. You'd have to go past the heat death of the universe to crack the encryption. It's theoretically possible to take over a ground station, but they're air-gapped, so you're not doing it remotely, and they're located in SCIFs on US military installations, which, putting aside what you may have seen on the X-Files or a Mission Impossible movie, aren't actually that easy to infiltrate. I recall my wife working on experimental aerial surveillance radar for the US Navy years back, and one of the testing sites had some AT&T contractors (probably accidentally) dig a little too close to the network fiber backbone and an unmarked black SUV showed up to take them to God knows where within two minutes.

cryptonector 3y ago
Back during the Iraq war the video feeds from drones and such were not encrypted, and people published some as a result. IIRC it was because there was not enough capacity on military sats, and the commercial sats used for this didn't have the necessary functionality. That's not to say that command and control functions were unauthenticated and unencrypted. But I suspect that older satellites -both American as well as not-American- are vulnerable, especially commercial ones predating modern cryptography, and since it takes a long time for modernity to filter through to specialized kit like satellites, I suspect that commercial satellites from before 2010 are generally vulnerable. American military satellites, I suspect, have been fairly secure for longer, though I have no specific knowledge, only an expectation that the NSA would have done their part to protect American assets in space.

cryptonector 3y ago

Back during the Iraq war the video feeds from drones and such were not encrypted, and people published some as a result. IIRC it was because there was not enough capacity on military sats, and the commercial sats used for this didn't have the necessary functionality. That's not to say that command and control functions were unauthenticated and unencrypted. But I suspect that older satellites -both American as well as not-American- are vulnerable, especially commercial ones predating modern cryptography, and since it takes a long time for modernity to filter through to specialized kit like satellites, I suspect that commercial satellites from before 2010 are generally vulnerable. American military satellites, I suspect, have been fairly secure for longer, though I have no specific knowledge, only an expectation that the NSA would have done their part to protect American assets in space.