Edd Salkield, Sebastian Köhler, Simon Birnbach, Richard Baker, Martin Strohmeier, Ivan Martinovic Presenter: Edd Salkield
Data from Earth observation satellites has become crucial in private enterprises, research applications, and in coordinating national responses to events such as forest fires. These purposes are supported by data derived from a variety of satellites, some of which do not secure the wireless channel effectively. This opens the door for modern adversaries to conduct spoofing attacks by overshadowing the signal with commercially available radio equipment.
In this paper, we assess the vulnerability of current satellite Earth observation systems to spoofing attacks. We show how advances in software-defined radio hardware enable attackers to arbitrarily manipulate received satellite images with only off-the-shelf equipment. Taking NASA’s live forest fire detection system as a case study, we demonstrate that the attacker can arbitrarily manipulate fires in the derived dataset to trigger false emergency response or mislead crisis analysis, and achieve denial of service in the processing software. We conclude with a discussion of physical-layer countermeasures to detect and defend against spoofing, even when the satellite hardware cannot be upgraded.