this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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[–] tal@lemmy.today 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

The official expressed concern that sensitive information β€” notably command data for European satellites β€” is unencrypted, because many were launched years ago without advanced onboard computers or encryption capabilities.

According to the article the satellites that were shadowed were:

Satellite Launch date
RASCOM-QAF1R August 4, 2010
Eutelsat 3B July 2014
Eutelsat Konnect VHTS September 7, 2022
Astra 4A November 18, 2007
SES-5 July 9, 2012
Eutelsat KA-SAT 9A December 26, 2010
Eutelsat 9B January 30, 2016
Eutelsat 3C February 12, 2009

That wasn't that long ago relative to encryption being done on computers.

[–] pmirallesr@piefed.social 24 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I'm a software engineer in space and the things I've heard are astounding. Basically space software as a sector is super backwards and operated under a "We're too far away to be hacked" mentality for way too long. Thankfully, that is changing, and the EU Space Act mandates cybersec in some cases

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 10 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

What's it like typing in zero-G? Does the keyboard float away from you?

[–] pmirallesr@piefed.social 4 points 22 hours ago

No, we tape it to the table, duh. But it's annoying when the tape covers the spacebar!

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 15 hours ago

How quickly could a radio wave get to space? Three minutes? Nah, it's fine. /s

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

What I observe is not so much a "we're too far away to be hacked" mentality, but rather a lackluster approach to software: "Software is just the cream on top that enables the real power of the hardware. So let's have our hardware engineers do the software as a side exercise. Surely it can't be that hard." Then you get hardware engineers, most of whom are fucking stupid in terms of SW development, writing flight software.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 15 hours ago

Ah yes, assuming experience in your field basically translates to every other field. A tale as old as time.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

My understanding is that in space systems, generally robustness trumps everything else, so old stable versions of everything are preferred. So it's generally a very conservative software stack and process.

[–] pmirallesr@piefed.social 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

generally robustness trumps everything else

Theoretically

So it’s generally a very conservative software stack and process.

Yes, but that sort of process promotes non-adoption of techniques and processes that could increase robustness but are shunned due to pessimistic conservativeness

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 1 points 22 hours ago

Oh yes absolutely. I was not trying to justify the design choices, just trying to explain their internal rationale.

[–] pmirallesr@piefed.social 2 points 22 hours ago

Yeah a fair bit of that too!

[–] reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, wtf is going on. GPG was released in 1999 and encryption existed before that too. https://www.ssldragon.com/blog/history-of-ssl-tls-versions/

How is this unencrypted

[–] tal@lemmy.today 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

There was something of a to-do a couple years ago when some researchers were trying to see how strong encryption satellites were using and whether they could break it and discovered that a number of of satellite operators weren't bothering to encrypt things at all.

EDIT:

This might be more recent than that:

https://www.kratosspace.com/constellations/articles/the-state-of-satellite-encryption

A new study from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Maryland has performed the most comprehensive public exploration into geostationary (GEO) satellite security yet, logging large amounts of unencrypted data being broadcast across 411 transponders on 39 GEO satellites, which were intercepted with a simple commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish costing a few hundred dollars.

Wow. Amazing. I basically encrypt everything by default because I'm so paranoid. Sometimes multiple layers of encryption