That implies anybody may arrange related {hardware} elsewhere on this planet and certain receive 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 kind of assault is extraordinarily low,” says Matt Blaze, a pc scientist and cryptographer at Georgetown College and legislation professor at Georgetown Legislation. “By the week after subsequent, we may have lots of or maybe 1000’s of individuals, lots 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 limitations to replicating their work, the researchers say, would possible be the lots 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, which will now be simpler to duplicate, too: The researchers are releasing their very own open-source software program software for decoding satellite tv for pc knowledge, additionally titled “Don’t Look Up,” on Github.
The researchers’ work might, they acknowledge, allow others with much less benevolent intentions to tug the identical extremely delicate knowledge from area. However they argue it can additionally push extra of the house owners 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 aspect 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 businesses with vastly superior satellite tv for pc receiver {hardware} have been analyzing the identical unencrypted knowledge for years. In truth, 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 identical time, they assume that the NSA—and each different intelligence company from Russia to China—has arrange satellite tv for pc dishes world wide to take advantage of 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 research, “then the place are my tax {dollars} going?”
Heninger compares their research’s revelation—the sheer scale of the unprotected satellite tv for pc knowledge out there for the taking—to a few of the revelations of Edward Snowden that confirmed how the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have been acquiring telecom and web knowledge on an infinite scale, usually by secretly tapping immediately into communications infrastructure.
“The risk mannequin that everyone had in thoughts was that we should be encrypting every part, as a result of there are governments which might be tapping undersea fiber optic cables or coercing telecom corporations into letting them have entry to the info,” Heninger says. “And now what we’re seeing is, this identical type of knowledge is simply being broadcast to a big fraction of the planet.”
