Independent researchers and The United States military has increasingly focused on the potential security vulnerabilities of satellites in orbit in recent years. These devices, which are primarily built with durability, reliability, and longevity in mind, were largely never intended to be ultra-secure. But at the ShmooCon security conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday, embedded device security researcher Carl Koscher raised questions about a different phase of a satellite’s life cycle: What happens when an old satellite is decommissioned and moves into a “graveyard orbit “?
Koscher and his colleagues received permission last year to access and broadcast from a Canadian satellite known as Anik F1R, launched to support Canadian broadcasters in 2005. and designed for 15 years of use. The satellite’s coverage extends below the southern border of the United States and reaches as far as Hawaii and the easternmost part of Russia. The satellite will soon move to its graveyard orbit and almost all other services that use it have already migrated to a new satellite. But while researchers could still talk to the satellite using special uplink license access and a transponder slot lease, Koscher had the ability to take over and broadcast to the northern hemisphere.
“My favorite thing was actually seeing it work!” Kosher tells WIRED. “It’s kind of unreal to go from creating a video stream to broadcasting across North America.”
Kosher and his colleagues at the telecom and embedded hacking group Shadytel broadcast live from another security conference, ToorCon San Diego, in October. At ShmooCon last week, he explained the tools they used to turn an unidentified commercial uplink facility (a station with a special powered antenna to communicate with satellites) into a command center for broadcasting from the satellite.
In this case, the researchers had permission to access both the uplink facility and the satellite, but the experiment highlights the interesting gray area where a defunct satellite is not in use but has not yet moved further from Earth to its final rest orbit.
“Technically, there’s no control over this satellite or most satellites—if you can generate a strong enough signal to get there, the satellite will send it back to Earth,” Kosher explains. “People are going to need a big antenna and a powerful amplifier and knowledge of what they’re doing. And if the satellite was fully utilized, they would have to outbid anyone else using that particular location or transponder frequency.
