That implies anybody might arrange related {hardware} some place else on this planet and sure acquire their very own assortment of delicate data. In spite of everything, the researchers restricted their experiment to solely off-the-shelf satellite tv for pc {hardware}: a $185 satellite tv for pc dish, a $140 roof mount with a $195 motor, and a $230 tuner card, totaling lower than $800.
“This was not NSA-level assets. This was DirecTV-user-level assets. The barrier to entry for this type of assault is extraordinarily low,” says Matt Blaze, a pc scientist and cryptographer at Georgetown College and regulation professor at Georgetown Legislation. “By the week after subsequent, we can have tons of or maybe 1000’s of individuals, a lot of whom gained’t inform us what they’re doing, replicating this work and seeing what they’ll discover up there within the sky.”
One of many solely boundaries to replicating their work, the researchers say, would doubtless be the tons of of hours they spent on the roof adjusting their satellite tv for pc. As for the in-depth, extremely technical evaluation of obscure knowledge protocols they obtained, that will now be simpler to copy, too: The researchers are releasing their very own open-source software program instrument for deciphering satellite tv for pc knowledge, additionally titled “Don’t Look Up,” on Github.
The researchers’ work could, they acknowledge, allow others with much less benevolent intentions to drag the identical extremely delicate knowledge from area. However they argue it’ll additionally push extra of the homeowners of that satellite tv for pc communications knowledge to encrypt that knowledge, to guard themselves and their clients. “So long as we’re on the facet of discovering issues which might be insecure and securing them, we really feel superb about it,” says Schulman.
There’s little doubt, they are saying, that intelligence companies with vastly superior satellite tv for pc receiver {hardware} have been analyzing the identical unencrypted knowledge for years. In reality, they level out that the US Nationwide Safety Company warned in a 2022 safety advisory concerning the lack of encryption for satellite tv for pc communications. On the similar time, they assume that the NSA—and each different intelligence company from Russia to China—has arrange satellite tv for pc dishes all over the world to use that very same lack of safety. (The NSA didn’t reply to WIRED’s request for remark).
“If they are not already doing this,” jokes UCSD cryptography professor Nadia Heninger, who co-led the examine, “then the place are my tax {dollars} going?”
Heninger compares their examine’s revelation—the sheer scale of the unprotected satellite tv for pc knowledge accessible for the taking—to a number of the revelations of Edward Snowden that confirmed how the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ had been acquiring telecom and web knowledge on an unlimited scale, usually by secretly tapping straight into communications infrastructure.
“The menace mannequin that everyone had in thoughts was that we have to be encrypting all the pieces, as a result of there are governments which might be tapping undersea fiber optic cables or coercing telecom firms into letting them have entry to the information,” Heninger says. “And now what we’re seeing is, this similar sort of knowledge is simply being broadcast to a big fraction of the planet.”
