Decoding Data from Iridium Satellites

http://www.rtl-sdr.com/talk-decoding-data-from-iridium-satellites/

by yashinm92 • 10 years ago

168 50 10 years ago

Later in the presentation he shows some interesting examples such as an intercepted Iridium satellte phone call to a C-37 aircraft.

So Iridium has been cracked, and no reactions so far? Am I missing something? This sounds like a Big Deal.

noselasd• 10 years ago

No. As with other satellite phones, security/encryption is an additional feature that you buy. For everyone else, there's no security/encryption - you just need to implement the system and protocols to tap into it - which is what has been done here. (And for the parts that have encryption, it's the data that's encrypted, while metadata (e.g. call setup) is still plain text)

MrBuddyCasino2• 10 years ago

That puts it into perspective, thanks. Interesting that unprotected metadata is something that the US army is willing to accept.

manarth• 10 years ago

Here's a transcript of the intercepted call that they played:

You have reached the 310 airlift squadron C-37 aircraft, tail number 0028.
To call the CSL press 1.
To call secure telephone number one, press 2.
To call secure telephone number two, press <missing>
Satcom direct Inmarsat connection in progress, please hold while we attempt to connect your call.
The approximate global connect time is <missing>
<ringing>

I suppose that selecting to connect to the secure phones could trigger an encryption layer on top of the call.

rsync• 10 years ago

Also ... correct me if I misremember ... but I think it is the case that with Iridium - encryption or no encryption - Eve can discern your physical location and get GPS coordinates for you.

Am I remembering that correctly ? I believe that got some journalists killed in Syria a few years ago ...

exabrial• 10 years ago

Whats the timestamp in the youtube video for that

kejaed• 10 years ago

It sort of like how US drones used to broadcast video unencrypted. They didn't bother since they thought the barrier to entry for seeing the feed was too high, until it wasn't.

https://www.wired.com/2012/10/hack-proof-drone/

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

Nobody seems to have learned a thing since the phreakers poked and prodded the phone network...

rasz_pl2• 10 years ago

same story with israeli drones https://theintercept.com/2016/01/28/israeli-drone-feeds-hack...

revelation• 10 years ago

There was nothing to crack, the only security is in the availability of easy-to-use receivers. Assume that any intelligence agency in the world has an archive of Iridium transmissions going many years back.

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

Was there not some talk about how Taliban or some such used open sat coms, and still "we" were unable to find them?

finchisko• 10 years ago

It's not surprising considering age of Iridium. Also I believe they don't make lot of money, so any development (also security related) is pretty much ceased.

dasmoth• 10 years ago

They make enough money that they've been able to fund the construction of a new generation of satellites. The first batch is due to launch next month.

iheartmemcache2• 10 years ago

Iridium is basically only still in business because of US armed forces (and maybe diplomatic services? though not sure how much field work they do..) operational dependencies. Editorial retraction, mea culpa: Wrong about the TACSAT statement here. See parent below for the http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-... Post chapter-11 (2000), investors got the whole Iridium infrastructure at sub-pennies on the dollar. (Literally. They got it for the price of the _single launch_ (i.e., not including materials, R&D, labor, etc) of their multitude (60ish) of sub-orbitals.).

Which I'm sure they're selling at absurd prices thanks to Sept 11.

Editorial retraction, mea culpa, #2 [conflated the hell out of ARSOF, again, see below. The economic analysis + usage of Iridium still holds.] C-37 is USAF aircraft - this dude seriously compromised his personal security by making this talk [and implicitly, his identity] public. He's going to have the pleasure of having SSSS scribbled onto every airline ticket he purchases from now on, I'd wager.

Iridium was such a brilliant buy. ROI at must be absolute insanity.

@Dasmoth - 64 billion dollars in grey-money was allocated for "Overseas Contingency Operations" by the Omnibus bill last December. I'm sure SAIC/Northrup/whoever gets the contract to 'fix this hole' is going to be enjoying the 800 million they secure from the Pentagon to basically modify transmissions/upgrade the firmware of the phones to use Diffie-Hellman handshakes and AES haha.

nxzero3• 10 years ago

SSSS is meaningless, never heard of anyone that had meaningful issues as a result of having this flag.

What is SSSS? See the Wikipedia page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_Security_Screening...

blantonl• 10 years ago

All TACSAT coms are done via single-channel Iridium networks at UHF.

Huh? Military UHF TACSAT communications are single channel UHF networks via geostationary satellites. But the military also makes extensive use of Iridium and INMARSAT networks to fill in gaps of bandwidth/availability coverage.

SATCOM / INMARSAT is heavily based on Iridium

Huh? No. Iridium is cross-linked Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) architecture. UHF Military TACSAT is geostationary dedicated transponders for the military - and those satellites also carry EHF/SHF payloads as well. INMARSAT is also Geostationary in the L and C band areas.

jandrese3• 10 years ago

INMARSAT is a different system entirely. Iridium uses a relatively massive constellation (77 birds, plus or minus) of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Inmarsat runs a handful of Geosynchronous (GEO) satellites.

Iridium has some advantages. It has coverage at the poles, where GEO sats typically do not. The mobile units can be small(ish) and handheld. But it also has some significant limitations. Datarates are in the 2400bps range. Latency goes all over the place due to the way the calls get routed through the constellation. Dropped calls are common.

Inmarsat operates a service called BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network), which depending on your hardware delivers speeds in the 128kbps to 512kbps range. The latency is always bad (GEO is a long way away), but more consistent. The terminals are big bulky affairs that range in size from a briefcase up to a mini-fridge. You can't hang one on your belt like you can with an Iridium phone, and some require you to set the antenna up and point it at the satellite manually.

While it is true that the Iridium company bought the system for a song, it's also true that they bought a massively expensive maintenance liability. You can't just ignore a satellite and expect it to keep working, they require operators on the ground to regularly monitor each and every bird to insure that it doesn't drift off orbit and to handle conditions that arise. They also have to launch replacement satellites regularly as the old ones start to fail. Plus they're building out a whole new system. The ROI is no doubt positive (they've been doing this for years now), but maybe not as much as you might expect. Iridium's biggest problem was its tiny userbase.

Motorola's whole business model with the original Iridium was pretty insane. They saw the relatively sparse deployment of cell towers back in the AMP era as something that was going to last. The only way to fix it was satellite communications, but the phones needed to be small enough to be used like cell phones (admittedly, compared to a 1980s cell phone they really weren't too bulky), which means low power which means LEO, which means you need a ton of satellites to cover the globe. By the time they finally got them all launched cell towers were everywhere and people (especially businessmen) realized that they liked using them indoors (which Iridium was terrible at) and paying only pennies per minute (instead of dollars per minute). The target audience was small, and many of those people couldn't afford the system at all.

earcaraxe• 10 years ago

Well, the dude is german, so he isn't in US jurisdiction so he's probably less concerned about it. Still jeopardizing his personal security for sure, and probably going to make it difficult to travel internationally.

hendzen• 10 years ago

There is an active market for iridium phone rentals for hiking/backpacking purposes, so they do get active use by civilians. Additionally in places like Alaska many people who live in remote areas have an iridium phone in as there is no cell coverage.

xvilka• 10 years ago

They're already produced and will start soon launching Iridium NEXT [1] satellites, moreover developed a whole platform called Iridium Prime [2].

[1] https://www.iridium.com/network/iridiumnext

[2] https://www.iridium.com/company/industryleadership/iridiumpr...

Apofis• 10 years ago

It would be pretty nice if they partnered up with someone like Verizon and offered service in places where there is no regular 2G/3G service, your phone would need to have a chip for it I suppose.

wyldfire• 10 years ago

The doppler shift described at ~14:45 was a really interesting component of Iridium that I recall when I learned about it many years ago.

These guys are great, this was an enjoyable presentation.

misterdata• 10 years ago

The doppler shfit also supposedly provided a clue about the whereabouts of MH370 after it disappeared: https://theaviationist.com/2014/03/27/inmarsat-helps-finding...

jandrese3• 10 years ago

To be fair, that wasn't Iridium, that was INMARSAT. Completely different company with a very different satellite system.

nneonneo• 10 years ago

Direct link to the talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvKaC4pNvck

CCC Munchen wiki pages on Iridium: https://wiki.muc.ccc.de/iridium:start

GitHub for the Iridium decoder software: https://github.com/muccc/gr-iridium

mintplant• 10 years ago

Thanks for the direct link. rtl-sdr.com seems to be having some issues at the moment.

robszumski• 10 years ago

Can anyone share articles about how these satellites are _managed_ remotely by their administrators, and the security around those connections?

I know newer entrants like Planet Labs run normal Linux on their satellites, and I assume use a normal SSH connection. What do the older platforms use? How do they move the key material around to the different ground stations?

tonyarkles• 10 years ago

I'm really hoping that the specific name of the software package comes to mind. There's a super old ground terminal command & data handling (C&DH) package that is very very common. It runs on Linux, and has a UI that looks like it's written using Motif.

I haven't worked in the space industry for almost 10 years now, but that was everywhere when I was there. And I'm hoping that the name will come to mind over the next few hours and I can edit this post :)

Edit: Success! ITOS: http://itos.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.php

neom• 10 years ago

this is so weird; http://john.je/hKnG

rasz_pl2• 10 years ago

drug dealers or outsourced cia rendition/black ops

nolanpro• 10 years ago

At least those guys know it's not encrypted.

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

That XML they found in the SDB channel seems like has to do with EU and fisheries. I guess it could be catch reports from trawlers.

And the FTP upload seems to be for the Air Force Weather Agency.

Also, a Mandrake 9.2 install doing a PPP dialup via iridium voice?! The world is indeed stranger than fiction.

Decoding Data from Iridium Satellites

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