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Evil-LAN-Feature

It sounds like the stuff of sky beams and science fiction considering for many years it was. In movies and on Television set, satellites are regularly hacked to perform dastardly deeds. But at Black Chapeau this week, researchers have shown a number of methods of launching real attacks against SATCOM systems. Four years ago, these attacks were but theoretical proof-of-concepts. Today, at Black Hat 2018, they aren't.

Ruben Santamarta, primary security consultant the security company IOActive, gave a preview of his upcoming talk on Thursday.

PCMag was on paw for the preview. Santamarta focused on 3 areas of investigation: aviation, maritime, and armed services. All 3 proved vulnerable to remote attack in different ways. In aviation, Santamarta was able to assault and disrupt various systems not related to keeping the aircraft flying through the sky. Digital devices carried by both passengers and crew were yet vulnerable to attack and could be targeted via onboard Wi-Fi.

The maritime and military applications were more directly threatening. In maritime applications, Santamarta could either alter antenna alignments or increase the amount of power these systems consumed to the betoken that they began interfering with other electronic equipment. Between antenna alignment access and the ability to compromise navigational systems simply through power draw, a blackness hat could leave a ship afloat, unable to trust its navigation equipment.

Every bit for military applications, the give-and-take there is grim. Santamarta was able to extract the precise GPS coordinates of every antenna he communicated with, posing an obvious danger to the location of anything with a satellite uplink. With command over both the position and the transmission ability of the satellites in question, he could theoretically launch attacks against the transponders in the satellites themselves.

"It is possible to use a specific amount of power in the transmission to create a scenario where biological and electric systems can be affected," Santamarta explained. "This can exist used to create burns if [people] are affected by the transmission of the antenna."

Mitigation development is already well underway, simply completely fixing these flaws could prove extremely difficult. SATCOM devices are oftentimes part of a fixed installation and can't exactly be popped into a trunk for a quick trip down to the IT department.

This is rather patently sensitive information and Santamarta stressed that he, his employer, and related authorities agencies had all worked together and cooperated fully in putting together both their written report on the vulnerabilities and the public spoken language to be given at BlackHat. Obviously, certain data will be omitted from the final talk.

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