Cédric Solenthaler (ETH Zurich), Joshua Smailes (University of Oxford), Martin Strohmeier (armasuisse Science & Technology)

An increase in availability of Software Defined Radios (SDRs) has caused a dramatic shift in the threat landscape of legacy satellite systems, opening them up to easy spoofing attacks by low-budget adversaries. Physical-layer authentication methods can help improve the security of these systems by providing additional validation without modifying the space segment. This paper extends previous research on Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF) of satellite communication to the Orbcomm satellite formation. The GPS and Iridium constellations are already well covered in prior research, but the feasibility of transferring techniques to other formations has not yet been examined, and raises previously undiscussed challenges. In this paper, we collect a novel dataset containing 8992474 packets from the Orbcom satellite constellation using different SDRs and locations. We use this dataset to train RFF systems based on convolutional neural networks. We achieve an ROC AUC score of 0.53 when distinguishing different satellites within the constellation, and 0.98 when distinguishing legitimate satellites from SDRs in a spoofing scenario. We also demonstrate the possibility of mixing datasets using different SDRs in different physical locations.

View More Papers

ReDAN: An Empirical Study on Remote DoS Attacks against...

Xuewei Feng (Tsinghua University), Yuxiang Yang (Tsinghua University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Xingxiang Zhan (Zhongguancun Lab), Kun Sun (George Mason University), Ziqiang Wang (Southeast University), Ao Wang (Southeast University), Ganqiu Du (China Software Testing Center), Ke Xu (Tsinghua University)

Read More

Iris: Dynamic Privacy Preserving Search in Authenticated Chord Peer-to-Peer...

Angeliki Aktypi (University of Oxford), Kasper Rasmussen (University of Oxford)

Read More

A Field Study to Uncover and a Tool to...

Leon Kersten (Eindhoven University of Technology), Kim Beelen (Eindhoven University of Technology), Emmanuele Zambon (Eindhoven University of Technology), Chris Snijders (Eindhoven University of Technology), Luca Allodi (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Read More

Starshields for iOS: Navigating the Security Cosmos in Satellite...

Jiska Classen (Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam), Alexander Heinrich (TU Darmstadt, Germany), Fabian Portner (TU Darmstadt, Germany), Felix Rohrbach (TU Darmstadt, Germany), Matthias Hollick (TU Darmstadt, Germany)

Read More