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Comment by gregschlom | Hacker News Reader

> The best scenario is that the issues are related to a software anomaly, and that engineers can then upload new commands.

Dear Santa, please bring me a 15m dish for Christmas, because I badly want to try to upload new commands too.

More seriously, I never realized that there are probably a lot of hackable things flying above our heads, provided that you have the appropriate equipment.

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Here's one example of a (trivially) hackable thing flying above our heads:

http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/U.S.-Navy-Satellite...

re: software anomaly

I'll have to remember that next time one of my clients finds an unexpected feature in their application.

There certainly are hackable things flying over your head. However, with your 15m dish men in black suits will zero-in on your location in a flash, and you'll be behind bars before you know it - probably before you can focus on the target out on space. So I'd suggest palling around with the chinese and russians and see if they'll provide you with some AA if you plan on doing that. Like anything else these days, you use cut-and-dried old fashion hacking techniques to gain access to the computer systems. There was just an article on this site about the russians hacking into some sewage plant. They didn't hack the valves and equipment directly, they guessed a password and got into the computers controlling the whole thing.

I'd imagine you need a particular encryption key to do it.

I'd bet, though, that many things aren't very well protected, because people designing space systems assume that nobody is going to try to mess with them, and also because they probably use proprietary communication protocols.

But just imagine how cool it would be to ssh into a satellite :)

It would be cool, but the latency would drive me crazy.

Just like the people that design SCADA systems in fact

A few years ago I worked for a satellite imagery company. I can tell you that communications with space vehicles in orbit are heavily encrypted using very strong and very proprietary algorithms that require special hardware. Because of this encryption, I had to acquire a government security clearance.

"very proprietary" does not usually imply "very strong".

It does when "very proprietary hardware" is code for "supplied by the NSA."

Older satellites might have crummy encryption like DES and might be hackable... (not a security guy, so talking out of my ass)

Actually no, these things pretty much fly in the open, chiefly out of necessity (recovering from bit transmission errors is much more complicated when encrypted, and uses up valuable power as well). Usually you have to know a prefix code to get the probe to listen, a la Dr. Strangelove.

It really is security-through-obscurity. Though that definitely isn't considered safe, a lot of spacecraft (especially deep-space ones) are pretty damn obscure. The true weakest link is the security at the ground station, not some fool with a 40 meter dish.

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