Secrets in the Sky: On Privacy and Infrastructure Security in

DVB-S Satellite Broadband

James Pavur Daniel Moser
james.pavur@cybersecurity.ox.ac.uk daniel.moser@inf.ethz.ch
Oxford University armasuisse / ETH Zurich

Vincent Lenders Ivan Martinovic

vincent.lenders@armasuisse.ch ivan.martinovic@cs.ox.ac.uk
armasuisse Oxford University
ABSTRACT ensuring these innovations do not endanger those who rely
Demands for ubiquitous global connectivity have sparked a on them.
satellite broadband renaissance. Secure satellite broadband This paper focuses on the ability of low-resourced malicious
is vital to ensuring that this growth does not beget unantici- actors to undermine privacy and security in one widely used
pated harm. Motivated by this need, this paper presents an satellite broadband protocol: DVB-S encapsulated IP traffic.
experimental security analysis of satellite broadband signals Particular attention is paid to the ability of attackers to com-
using the Digital Video Broadcasting for Satellite (DVB-S) promise consumer privacy and damage satellite-dependent
protocol. This analysis comprises 14 geostationary platforms critical infrastructure. This threat is tested experimentally
encompassing over 100 million square kilometers of combined using traffic captures from 14 geostationary satellites pro-
coverage area. viding a combined signal footprint of more than 100 million
Using less than e300 of widely available equipment, we square kilometers (Figure 1).
demonstrate the ability to identify individual satellite cus-
tomers, often down to full name and address, and their web
browsing activities. Moreover, we find that these vulnerabili-
ties may enable damaging attacks against critical infrastruc-
ture, including power plants and SCADA systems. The paper
concludes with a discussion of possible confidentiality protec-
tions in satellite broadband environments and notes a need
for further cryptographic research on link-layer encryption
for DVB-S broadband.
ACM Reference Format:
James Pavur, Daniel Moser, Vincent Lenders, and Ivan Martinovic.
2019. Secrets in the Sky: On Privacy and Infrastructure Security
in DVB-S Satellite Broadband. In WiSec ’19: Conference on
Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, May 15–
17, 2019, Miami, FL, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3317549.3323418

1 INTRODUCTION Figure 1: Transmissions destined for locations covered by the

polygon on this map were analyzed at our collection site in
Satellite based internet communications have existed for
Europe.
nearly as long as the internet itself [1]. Today, satellite broad-
band is experiencing something of a market renaissance driven
by demand in the developing world and the expected coverage
demands of the Internet of Things and autonomous vehicle 2 RELATED WORK
sectors [2, 3, 4]. Robust communications security is vital to Most relevant academic work on satellite broadband security
predates the emergence of smartphones and recent dramatic
Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM acknowledges that this growth in the internet of things and connected infrastructure
contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor sectors. Prior work tends to focus on only individual satel-
or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains lites and as a result, identified issues may simply have been
a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article,
or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only. shortcomings of a single service provider.
WiSec ’19, May 15–17, 2019, Miami, FL, USA In 2005, a team of researchers from Ruhr University Bochum
© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights published what appears to have been the first experimen-
licensed to ACM.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6726-4/19/05. . . $15.00 tal security study of satellite broadband [5]. They collected
https://doi.org/10.1145/3317549.3323418 traffic from a single Astra satellite (since depreciated) and
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WiSec ’19, May 15–17, 2019, Miami, FL, USA James Pavur, Daniel Moser, Vincent Lenders, and Ivan Martinovic

observed that the satellite transmitted DVB-S encapsulated Inmarsat’s BGAN system), this makes DVB-S a particularly
web-browsing data in the clear. The researchers noted that attractive target for attackers [20].
these short-comings may have been the responsibility of end- The DVB-S standard transmits data per the Moving Pic-
users who relied on unencrypted protocols such as POP3 tures Experts Group (MPEG) standards in the form of
emails [5]. MPEG transport streams (MPEG-TS) [21]. While MPEG-
A few years later, at Black Hat 2009, private security TS is primarily used for media broadcasting, the standard
researcher Adam Laurie presented on a traffic interception has also been extended to support many other types of data.
experiment which used modified equipment provided by a In particular, one such extension, called “Digital Storage
satellite ISP [6]. This was followed at Black Hat in 2010 Media Command and Control” (DSM-CC) was developed
by Leonardo Nve Egea, who demonstrated satellite internet to provide interactive features on Video Cassette Recorders
sniffing using DVB PCI cards in the Ka-Band [7]. Some pe- (VCR) [22]. As demands for interactive satellite broadband
ripherally related academic work has emerged in the form services grew, DSM-CC was repurposed to relay arbitrary
of various standards revisions for satellite internet [8, 9, 10]. packetized data to and from satellite internet customers via an
Moreover, some related non-academic work on other aspects additional encapsulation layer called Multiprotocol Encapsu-
of satellite systems (such as the security of software on satel- lation (MPE) [23]. A subsequent revision of the MPE method
lite terminals) has taken place [11, 12]. However, the past called Unidirectional Lightweight Encapsulation (ULE) has
eight years have seen very little study of satellite broadband also been created which allows for the transmission of packe-
transmissions and more than a decade has elapsed since major tized data without the use of DSM-CC tables [23]. In both
academic consideration of these networks. protocols, IP packets destined for many distinct customers
Beyond academia and security conferences, hobbyist and are transmitted on the same stream and then extracted by
criminal communities are the primary source of modern customer equipment on the basis of address information in the
domain-specific research. For example, online communities IP header or ISP-assigned MAC addresses in the MPE/ULE
dedicated to the receipt of free satellite television have devel- headers.
oped various high-quality tools for scanning, intercepting, and
interpreting DVB-S signals [13, 14]. Online forums dedicated 3.1 Data Visibility
to the illegal cracking and cloning of private keys associated The specific topology of satellite networks can have significant
with satellite television networks are active hotbeds of infor- impacts on an attacker’s ability to understand broadband
mal offensive security research [15]. Finally, criminal groups transmissions. Our threat model takes into account two of
have demonstrated the usage of satellite internet connections the most common network topologies.
for exfiltrating data to undetectable command-and-control
stations [16].
In short, only a small body of high-quality but dated aca-
demic research exists. Researchers in the 2000s suggested
severe security shortcomings in DVB-S broadband but no as-
MPE Two Way Traffic
sessment has been performed to assess if the modern situation ISP Transponder
has improved or changed [5, 6, 7]. This paper updates and
expands previous findings in the context of modern internet
traffic. Unlike prior research, which focused on individual
Attack Attack
satellites and providers, we focus on a broad cross-section of Position
Position Internet
the industry and present what we believe to be the first large- Home User 2
1 Satellite Ground Station
scale multi-satellite security study of DVB-S broadband.

Figure 2: A single-band two-way satellite internet setup. At-

3 DVB-S NETWORKS tackers at position 1 and 2 will see downstream and upstream
The long distances in geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satel- traffic respectively.
lite networks (72,000 km from customer to ISP) have resulted
in protocols designed specifically for satellite radio broadcasts. The first configuration leverages two-way linkages from the
Among these is the widely used Digital Video Broadcasting- customer’s satellite dish and is ideal in remote locations (such
Satellite (DVB-S) and DVB-S version 2 (DVB-S2) proto- as rural areas or naval vessels) where no terrestrial connec-
cols [17]. DVB-S is widely used in the provision of satellite tivity is available (Figure 2). The customer transmits a web
television services. This has resulted in the emergence of a request directly to a satellite which then relays these requests
large number of free tools and protocol analyzers allowing on another beam towards an ISP-controlled ground station.
individuals to receive satellite television without purchasing At the ground station, this request is relayed across the
subscriptions. Moreover, DVB-S is the de facto global stan- wider internet and the response is subsequently transmitted
dard for satellite broadcast and IP services, particularly from back the customer. An attacker listening to the downlink-to-
GEO [18, 19]. When compared with more proprietary proto- consumer connection (Position 1 in Figure 2) could intercept
cols for which comparatively little public tooling exists (e.g. responses from the internet while an attacker listening to the
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downlink-to-ISP connection (Position 2 in Figure 2) would be specialized hardware targeted to their ISP is used in the
able to view requests made to the internet. Depending on the form of a satellite receiver/modem. Relying on generic equip-
specific geographic location of the attacker in either scenario, ment can increase processing errors – especially for complex
additional traffic may also be visible through interception of modulation modes such as 16 and 32-APSK.
signals emanating from antenna side lobes.
The second configuration offered by some specialized ISPs
such as Broadsat’s Opensky combines satellite and terrestrial 4.2 Deployment
linkages (Figure 3) [24]. Uplink requests are transmitted via Two inexpensive satellite receiver assemblies (of the sort in-
a terrestrial connection, which typically has better latency tended for RV-camping) were deployed to simulate this threat
(Position 1 in Figure 3). Requests are sent to a proxy operated model. One consisted of a 75 cm, flat-panel satellite receiver
by the satellite ISP (Position 2 in Figure 3) and responses re- dish and a TBS-6983 DVB-S receiver. The other consisted of
layed back to the user via satellite (Positions 3-5 in Figure 3). a 60 cm flat-panel dish, a motorized targeting assembly, and
Such configurations are ideal in cases where uplink latency is a TBS-6903 DVB-S receiver. The 75 cm dish remained in a
of higher priority than uplink bandwidth and for customers fixed position while the 60 cm dish was repositioned to target
with extant but inadequate terrestrial service. Here, an at- many satellites over the duration of the study. The panels
tacker would be incapable of observing uplink traffic over the were configured to receive Ku-band transmissions between
air as it is transmitted via wire rather than radio. 10,700 MHz and 12,750 MHz with both vertical and horizon-
tal polarizations. Both assemblies were located in Europe and,
due to environmental constraints, could observe geostationary
satellites positioned between 40°East and 37°West.
A set of 14 geostationary satellites were selected based on
Downlink ISP Transponder signal quality at the collection site. From these satellites over
5
4 350 transponders were identified using existing “Blind Scan”
tools.
A collection of Python utilities developed for the purpose
DSL/Dial-Up Uplink 3 of this study was used to analyze each of these transponders
Home User 1 ISP Proxy for signs of DVB-based internet transmissions on the basis of
Satellite Ground Station
2 three criteria. First, a stream was deemed more likely to carry
internet traffic if DSM-CC (MPE) services were listed in the
Internet stream’s program table. Second, streams which contained
valid UDP or TCP packets, based on existing MPEG-TS
dissectors in Wireshark, were flagged as candidates. Finally,
Figure 3: A combined terrestrial uplink, space downlink satel- streams were parsed against a list of regular expressions
lite internet setup commonly seen in internet traffic. A total of 19 streams met
at least two of these criteria and 4 additional matches were
identified on the basis of the regular expression engine alone.
4 EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN From these 23 transponders, streams which appeared to carry
4.1 Attacker Equipment IP-TV traffic or simple device firmware update services were
discarded, along with streams with extremely low signal
For this study, we sought to discern the capabilities of a
quality and throughput (anything less than 5 kb/s). This left
single malicious individual rather than a larger organization
13 transponders for further study.
or nation state. As such, we restricted our equipment selection
to hardware that was readily available for purchase online and
only employed free software tools. The total cost of necessary 5 DATA COLLECTION
equipment was under e300, as demonstrated by the budget
In June, 2018, approximately five hours of traffic were recorded
in Table 1.
on each of the 13 selected transponders. These recordings
Table 1: Hypothetical Attacker Budget were initiated automatically in sequence over the course of
three days. Each recording was processed to remove NULL
packets and irrelevant program data (such as programme
Equipment Cost data related to satellite television). After this process we were
Selfsat H30D Satellite Dish e85 left with 50 gigabytes of satellite internet traffic. Depending
TBS 6983 Satellite PCI-E Card e197 on location, radio conditions, and transmission modes, the
3-Meter Coaxial Cable e3 amount of data collected per transponder ranged from as low
Total e285 as 8 megabytes to as high as 10 gigabytes (see Figure 4).
As anticipated in Section 4.1, recordings included many
It is worth noting that equipment quality can have a data errors resulting from our use of general-purpose hobby-
meaningful impact on capabilities. For legitimate customers, ist equipment. Nevertheless, sufficient information could be
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10000 Furthermore, satellite interception offers a privileged ISP-

esque vantage-point and enables eavesdropping on the en-
tirety of a target’s traffic.
Traffic Volume (MB)

1000
6.1 Privacy
A surprising amount of sensitive information appeared in the
100
collected data. Indeed, many of the same categories identified
over a decade ago still appear in modern satellite traffic.
One significant improvement since the mid-2000s has been
increased adoption of SSL/TLS encryption. While this pro-
10 tects against certain types of eavesdropping attacks, the very
process of requesting and exchanging SSL certificates leaks
potentially revealing information. Our data included over
1 52,000 SSL “wildcard” certificates from around 1,200 distinct
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
domains (Figure 5). Information a user might consider deeply
Satellite ID private – such as TLS certificates or DNS responses from
various adult websites – is, in fact, being broadcast across an
Figure 4: Volume of internet traffic on each targeted transpon- entire continent. With collating data, such as knowledge of a
der during the five-hour analysis window. user’s IP address, this risk becomes particularly severe.

*.google.com
extracted despite this corruption to give a general characteri- *.gvt1.com
*.googleapis.com
zation of security concerns. *.g.doubleclick.net
*.adnxs.com
5.0.1 Ethics, Data Privacy, and Legal Considerations. Prior *.icloud.com
to our experiment, it was unclear what sort of information *.mail.me.com
[PRIVATE - ENERGY PROVIDER]
would be uncovered. As such, we assumed a worst-case sce- *.google-analytics.com
nario and treated all recorded radio signals as if they might *.dropbox.com
*.c.docs.google.com
contain sensitive information. Data was stored at the collec- *.criteo.com
tion site in Europe and both physical and electronic access *.crashlytics.com
*.1.oca.nflxvideo.net
was restricted. Local laws relating to the interception and *.googleusercontent.com
analysis of radio traffic were strictly adhered to. We also *.smoot.apple.com
*.pipe.aria.microsoft.com
made plans to responsibly disclose any security issues which *.twimg.com
warranted it to the appropriate authorities. After the study *.rubiconproject.com
all collected data was deleted. *.doubleclick.net
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000

6 FINDINGS
Across all thirteen frequencies included in the final phase Figure 5: The top 20 domains identified on a basis of SSL
of our study, broadband traffic was transmitted in plain- certificates. Number 8 has been hidden as it is a private sub-
text. Of course, well-encrypted transmissions would not have domain range for a major energy provider.
been distinguishable from non-internet traffic and it is thus
unclear to what extent these thirteen service providers are
While SSL usage is widespread, our naive string-matching
representative of the industry as a whole. Nevertheless, having
analysis nevertheless uncovered thousands of unencrypted
the same issues appear over many distinct providers suggests
HTTP requests, file downloads, FTP sessions, torrent connec-
that the earlier single-provider studies discussed in Section 2
tions, VoIP conversations and emails. The chart in Table 2
were not merely anecdotal and the problems they identified
indicates which of these general classes of sensitive informa-
have not yet been addressed.
tion were identified on each of the 13 transponders. Due to
The dangers of unencrypted wireless transmissions are well
the sensitive nature of our findings, specific service providers
understood and, to some degree, academically uninteresting.
and satellite names have been withheld. These findings raise
However, unique properties of satellite broadband act as
legal and business concerns regarding whether it is the re-
novel risk-multipliers.
sponsibility of satellite service providers to protect customers
The principle differentiator is scale. Our experiment in-
using insecure protocols over DVB-S or if responsibility for
cluded data from a coverage footprint of more than 110
encryption in transit falls to end-users.
million square kilometers (Figure 1). A handful of strate-
gically located satellite dishes, would allow an attacker to 6.1.1 Demonstrative Cases. Beyond this broad sense of infor-
intercept broadband signals encompassing most of the globe. mation leakage, a number of individual “narratives” emerged
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Table 2: Observed Traffic Contents 6.2 Infrastructure

Through manual inspection of intercepted traffic, we detected
Stream TLS HTTP Email Tokens FTP Files Torrent VoIP
1 No Yes No No No Yes No No flows associated with electrical power generation facilities.
2 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes The majority of these were wind and solar farms but we also
3 Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes encountered facilities associated with the oil and gas industry.
4 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes
These were not isolated to a single provider but appeared
5 Yes Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes
6 Yes Yes No Yes No No No Yes both across several satellite internet services and terrestrial
7 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes infrastructure operators.
8 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes While in some cases, such as an American solar power
9 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
10 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
provider, TLS encryption was employed to protect infrastruc-
11 Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes ture traffic, a large number of operators used unencrypted
12 Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes HTTP and FTP connections. In the case of one specific
13 Yes Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes software platform commonly used in wind-power generation
industry, over 5,000 plaintext requests were observed to vari-
during manual analysis. Although anecdotal, these incidents ous facilities and administration pages (Figure 7). Inside these
provide perspective on the need for communications security requests we found credentials in the form of either HTTP
improvements. These incidents ranged from individuals who Basic Authorization tokens or as session cookies that could
shared national identification numbers with hotels via plain- be used to gain unauthorized access to the plants. Moreover,
text email messages to online shoppers submitting payment Credentials belonging to a company which operates almost
details in clear-text. a fifth of the world’s installed wind energy base appeared
One such case relates to an individual who connected his frequently in unencrypted FTP control flows. Vulnerable sys-
iPhone to a wifi network and synced his email client over tems administration pages and FTP servers were publicly
IMAP. From the information he downloaded we were able to routable from the open internet. This means that an attacker
determine the specific town in northern Spain where he lived, could sniff a session token from a satellite connection, open
his full name, phone number, and both his office and personal a web browser, and login to the plant’s control panel.
addresses. If this were not concerning enough, the individual
proved to be a defense lawyer. Included in the traffic were
specific and confidential communications between him and
his clients regarding ongoing cases and the preparation of
evidence for an upcoming trial (Figure 6). The data could
have been intercepted by nearly anyone in Europe or Northern
and Western Africa. Our ability to intercept it raises serious
concerns for attorney-client privilege.

Figure 7: The login page for one vulnerable wind farm we

encountered in our traffic. Credentials to access this site were
readily identified in satellite transmissions.

Beyond electrical plants, other infrastructure traffic also ap-

peared in our dataset. For example, on a handful of transpon-
ders we identified Modbus traffic – a popular serial protocol
widely used in SCADA systems and PLCs. In another in-
Figure 6: The footer of one email from a lawyer to his client
stance, a satellite transponder appears to have been reserved
which was sent in plaintext via satellite internet. Sensitive
for the national postal service of a sizeable Eastern Euro-
information has been censored.
pean country and several of their intranet credentials were
transmitted in plain text. References to maritime products
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appeared in the streams, but an in-depth analysis of maritime from inspecting the necessary packet headers to continue
communications protocols was well beyond the project scope. providing these services.
In the early 2000s, several solutions to these issues emerged,
ranging from decrypting traffic at the satellite ISP ground
station and re-encrypting for transmission over the internet
7 POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS to implementing revisions to the IPSec protocol itself to ex-
Our findings suggest a need for improved communications tract TCP headers needed for PEP usage, however these have
privacy in satellite broadband. The current state of industry gained little traction [9, 26, 31]. While promising standards
has resulted in the leakage of sensitive information from both proposals exist for encrypted satellite data links in scien-
individual and industrial satellite broadband customers. tific missions, additional work adapting these to multi-user
The application of terrestrial encryption techniques to broadband ecosystems is needed [32].
satellite environments is non-trivial. Satellite transmissions Beyond work to bolster satellite internet encryption, future
cover vast distances and are subject to speed-of-light latency work characterizing these vulnerabilities may prove useful.
effects (upwards of 500ms for a round-trip transmission to While broader than previous research, our study still only
GEO) and packet loss which can impair the function of studied a handful of operators in the Ku-band and was re-
encryption schemes designed for high-reliability terrestrial stricted to the DVB-S protocol. Moreover, our experimen-
environments (e.g. by requiring re-transmission of corrupted tation was limited to passive eavesdropping attacks only.
key materials) [25, 26]. Moreover, satellites themselves are Research on the capabilities of an attacker to compromise
limited in terms of computing capabilities and any on-board not just the confidentiality but also the integrity of satellite
cryptographic operation risks trading off with other mission broadcasts may uncover additional status quo risks. For ex-
functionality [26]. ample, attacks against the layer-two routing protocols used in
In television networks, “scrambling” algorithms which ap- satellite networks may facilitate sophisticated session spoofing
ply encryption to an entire MPEG-TS programme are widely and hijacking attacks.
used to prevent piracy of premium television channels. How-
ever, these techniques are, at present, not well suited to 8 CONCLUSION
internet traffic for two reasons. First, many of the dominant Our experimental analysis raises significant concerns for the
algorithms in this space (e.g. the Common Scrambling Algo- security of DVB-S broadband. Severe confidentiality short-
rithm or PowerVu) have been demonstrated to have severe comings were identified across more than a dozen service
cryptographic weaknesses [27, 28, 29]. While these may be operators and several gigabytes of potentially sensitive web
acceptable for low sensitivity TV broadcasts, where the prin- traffic were collected in a matter of hours. An attacker with
ciple goal is often to simply increase the complexity of piracy, cheaply available hobbyist equipment may compromise the
internet traffic and sensitive data may merit more robust security and privacy of individuals in an area encompassing
protections. Moreover, because these scrambling algorithms hundreds of millions of square kilometers. Moreover, satel-
apply at the level of entire streams, customers necessarily lite eavesdropping provides a potential route to harming
share access to a “master key” (often updated at regular inter- many connected critical infrastructure systems such as power-
vals) which could be used to compromise the privacy of other generation facilities.
customers whose traffic is multiplexed into the same trans- We suggest that future cryptographic work which finds a
mission [29]. Future work which builds on these scrambling balance between satellite network performance and robust
techniques with a focus on the needs of internet customers encryption represents a critical step towards resolving these
may represent a possible avenue for developing more robust issues. This work might build off of progress in stream-level
DVB-S protections. scrambling techniques or in revisions to terrestrial encryption
One alternative approach would be the use of tunneling protocols that account for unique characteristics of satellite
mechanisms such as IPSec. In the short term, this is likely networks.
the best approach for individual customers and infrastruc- Secure satellite internet is vital to reaping the rewards of
ture operators. However, terrestrial tunneling technologies a connected future. In light of growth in the infrastructure
impose significant performance constraints over satellite con- and IoT space, the security community and satellite industry
nections [8]. Due to the significant latency in GEO broad- must cooperate to make satellite broadband private, reliable,
casting, satellite service operators have adopted connection and secure.
acceleration techniques which help minimize these effects.
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