A crash course on hacking satellites

by PatrolX • 6 years ago

420 62 6 years ago

kanobo• 6 years ago

Oh interesting, this guide was made in partnership with the Air Force?? (see footer)

gnabgib• 6 years ago

Yes, this is part of the Hack-a-Sat competition from Defcon.. the wired article[0] posted here two days ago[1] goes into more detail

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/nyansat-open-source-satellite-tr... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049836

mindcrime• 6 years ago

"Oh yeah, you want a seriously righteous hack, you score one of those orbiting satellites, man. You know, satellites they use to like, do cosmology, and look for oil and stuff?"

chrisstanchak• 6 years ago

Hack the Gibson

karmicthreat2• 6 years ago

Hack-a-sat is going to be a fun time this weekend. Far enough outside most of our domain knowledge that you have to learn quick and on the fly.

kwesthaus• 6 years ago

Are you competing this weekend? I put together a small team for qualifiers and had a blast with the CTF problems. We did well enough to get challenge coins but not to move on to finals.

lozaning• 6 years ago

I saw one of the teams that is competing this weekend had like 57 people from 13 countries. Makes me feel better about my team not qualifying.

Interested in watching the contest this weekend go down though. Tons of smart people doing interesting stuff.

karmicthreat2• 6 years ago

Yep! My original team wasn’t quite high enough to be top 9. We merged with another team a member was friends with.

inamberclad• 6 years ago

What is the hacking part here? This looks like how to set up a ground station.

AtHeartEngineer• 6 years ago

To get started hacking satellites, you've got to communicate with them first

leoedin• 6 years ago

You're not going to do much outward communication with a receive-only SDR though. Not really hacking as much as listening.

PatrolX2• 6 years ago

Take the red pill, and find your way there.

joncrane• 6 years ago

I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the hilarity of the domain name. For those who don't get it: it's a play on the name of the nyan-cat meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyan_Cat

system2• 6 years ago

I never understood why it got popular. Dancing baby was worse though.

smichel172• 6 years ago

I think this should explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Lammy• 6 years ago

I'm enjoying the section titles too:

Satellites? Orbiting MY planet?

It's more likely than you think.

_underfl0w_• 6 years ago

I remember hearing that Sum 41 (they're actually still around!) got sued for using Nyan Cat in a music video or something. Let's hope the author doesn't find this site haha

tectonic• 6 years ago

Be sure to check out https://www.hackasat.com/ this weekend as part of DEF CON!

jeffrallen• 6 years ago

Hacking for feds... Hmm, yeah, think I'll pass on that "offer".

caiobegotti• 6 years ago

Read the disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

felbane• 6 years ago

Great job, citizen! Here are your celebratory linked steel bracelets. Enjoy your vacation!

TuringNYC• 6 years ago

All the kits are sold out - has anyone found a quick way to get all the parts?

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

The shame here is that the PCB isn't easily available. I can supply pan/tilt kits and SDRs, but I can't even get a CAD of their PCB to order a batch.

Taniwha• 6 years ago

Looking closely at the PCB I suspect he's really worried that he's going to fuck it up

janekm• 6 years ago

The PCB isn't really needed. It's just the ESP32 module and servo driver board (the one you can buy from Adafruit) combined on one PCB, the instructions show how to wire those up separately (I stared at the PCB for a few minutes trying to figure out what it had to do with hacking sats... It's just a motor driver/servo interface PCB).

lburton• 6 years ago

https://github.com/RedBalloonShenanigans/antenny/tree/master... seems to have the altium files

ReedJessen• 6 years ago

Will there be another run of kits made?

samplatt• 6 years ago

They're easy and cheap to buy from arduino stores (or similar). The only part of their shopping list that I don't have in my general "unfinished projects" bin is the pan/tilt gimbal. I've built one manually before but it was a bit crappy.

PatrolX2• 6 years ago

US Air Force Space Security Challenge 2020: Hack-a-Sat

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991947

anonymousiam• 6 years ago

Yes. It sucks that they only took the top 10 teams. My team scored in the top 1.5%, but did not qualify.

elwell• 6 years ago

I didn't know you could embed CSS animations in an SVG file.

It's a thing of beauty: https://nyan-sat.com/assets/licensed/orbital_comparison.svg

Be sure to view page source.

sillysaurusx• 6 years ago

This seems noticeably snappier than canvas, too.

codezero• 6 years ago

Oh gosh, now I'm going to go see how hard it would be to replicate the canvas API with programatic SVGs.

pierrec• 6 years ago

It works smoothly for a smallish diagram like this, but that's as far as it goes. I attempted to create a 100% SVG music score editor and only realized my mistake after having put way too much work into it: working with large scores was sluggish to the point of making the whole thing useless. If you want snappy, I believe the best approach currently is to use a library that emulates the canvas API on WebGL (for example Pixi.js).

sci_prog• 6 years ago

Wow! Thanks for noticing this. It is brilliant! Now just gotta think of a project where I could use this ha!

joeraut• 6 years ago

Cool CSS animations aside, that diagram is fantastic!

Edit: It also handles i18n for EN, FR and ES by displaying different titles and hyperlinks for different system languages. Jaw dropped.

jb_s• 6 years ago

How can you even do that?

SVG is insane

edit: like this:

    <title>Comparison of several satellite navigation system orbits</title>
 <switch>
  <desc systemLanguage="es">Comparación de las órbitas geoestacionaria, GPS, GLONASS, Galileo y BeiDou (satélites de órbita media), Estación Espacial Internacional, Telescopio Espacial Hubble, Constelación Iridium y órbita cementerio con los cinturones de radiación de Van Allen y el tamaño nominal de la tierra, ilustración de CMG Lee. Bitmap de la Tierra https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_pole_february_ice-pack_1978-2002.png by Geo Swan. La órbita de la Luna es cerca de 9 veces más grande (en radio y largo) que la órbita geoestacionaria. Esta animación se mueve a 1 hora por segundo. En el archivo SVG, se puede posicionar el mouse sobre una órbita o su nombre para resaltarla y hacer clic para ir a su respectivo articulo en la Wikipedia.</desc>

0000000000100• 6 years ago

The guy who made this seems to have done a lot of these SVG/CSS amalgomations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee/Dynamic_SVG_for_Wi...

This subtraction game is particularly interesting: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Subtract...

yipbub• 6 years ago

Interesting challenge! Solution:

fgnegre jvaf, nyjnlf pubbfr crapvy orybatvat gb gur yrsg bs n zhygvcyr bs sbhe (jvgu crapvyf ahzorerq sebz bar gb gjragl bar)

(Decipher with https://rot13.com/)

Cyphase• 6 years ago

This animation[1] is going to be the picture of the day on the English Wikipedia on August 21st, 2020.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_satellite_navi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:POTD/2020-08-21

Brajeshwar• 6 years ago

There was a recent story about free Vector Illustrations[1]. If I'm guessing it right, most of these SVGs are CSS animated, if not, it should be.

So, my business-partner, friend, and co-founder is like 10x better than me in design and front-end. Around 2012-13, he showed me how to animate some diagrammatic illustration with SVG and CSS. That was when I realized how brilliant it is to code animations and was thus highly scalable and responsive.

1. https://www.pixeltrue.com/free-illustrations

m-p-3• 6 years ago

On a similar tangent, you might find this interesting

https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/

saagarjha• 6 years ago

SVG is great, it's sort of a simplified iframe in an img element. It's great for implementing crispy animations that you don't want to have to fiddle with the DOM for.

superkuh• 6 years ago

You can even embed and run javascript from within an svg, http://nowhere.superkuh.com/js.svg

jamesholden• 6 years ago

I have always wanted to do something with satellites. Especially with SpaceX and global satellite internet coming. What can I do/learn? What will be valid in the next 5-10 years? I'm not sure where to start.

non-entity• 6 years ago

I've seen tutorial and projects that consume data from satellites, but I imagine there's not much for the hobbyist outside that.

TedDoesntTalk• 6 years ago

You mean like the website in the post?

https://nyan-sat.com/chapter4.html

ColanR2• 6 years ago

I think the true hacker would learn by doing. Good luck!

Rebelgecko• 6 years ago

Cube sats are probably the most accessible way to get involved, other than getting a job where you get paid to work with satellites. "most accessible" is relative, high altitude balloons check a lot of the same boxes and don't require a sponsor to put you on-orbit

xconverge• 6 years ago

Buy a rtlsdr and start by getting some images from weather satellites

fit2rule3• 6 years ago

I wish there were a simple and easy way to connect to a satellite, at the same kind of level of effort as .. say .. connecting to a BBS in the 80's .. and access it, just like an 80's BBS - i.e. upload a message, wait for a response while the thing flies overhead/across the globe, etc.

I guess this project kind of achieves that in a way. If you can build the hardware you can access a very elite messaging system.

It just seems to me to be a great place to put a BBS. I wonder if there are satellites up there that have that kind of interface ..

amenghra2• 6 years ago

Others have wished for BBS on satellite, as far back as 1988: http://phrack.org/issues/21/5.html

fit2rule3• 6 years ago

Hey, maybe I read it there and am only just imagining it again, you never know .. ;)

jibcage• 6 years ago

As a matter of fact, there are several! FalconSat-3 is the one most people connect to in the USA. I think there might also be one aboard the ISS, but most people use the ISS for forwarding APRS packets.

You need an amateur radio license to connect to these, but once you have one you can get into all sorts of other radio projects around the world too :)

Edit: The downside, of course, is that you usually only have (at most) a 20-minute connection window before you lose line-of-sight, since these satellites are in LEO.

https://www.amsat.org/falconsat-3/

fit2rule3• 6 years ago

That is really nice to know, thanks for the info .. I'll have to find someone in my scene who can log onto falconsat, I'm sure I know a HAM or two who might at least pick up the flag and demo it one of these days ..

ColanR2• 6 years ago

I'm surprised (but maybe I shouldn't be) that there's no mention at all of antennas. I guess it's a lot easier to get a signal from something in line of sight above you.

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

There are a couple nation states that would love to take over starlink once it is activated.

flingo• 6 years ago

Why do you think that? Are you just guessing?

amenghra2• 6 years ago

Small typo at the beginning, seems the microcontroller is ESP32, not EPS32.

antihero• 6 years ago

I hope they leave this up after DEFCON. It looks really easy to follow and I would like to get back into hacking on hardware when I got a bit more time.

A crash course on hacking satellites

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