Breaking the Beam: Exploiting VSAT Satellite Modems from the Earth's Surface

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Presented at DEFCON 23 by

Vincent Lenders

Johannes Willbold

Robin Bisping

VSAT satellite communication systems are widely used to provide two-way data and voice communications to remote areas, including maritime environments, crisis regions, and other locations where terrestrial communication infrastructure is limited or unavailable. In this presentation, we report on our security findings from our reverse-engineering efforts to exploit VSAT satellite modems from the Earth. We will focus on the Newtec MDM2200 from iDirect as an example. First, we explain how we reverse-engineered the software stack running on the modem device to find 0-day vulnerabilities. Then, we show how we reverse-engineered the network stack to devise attacks that can be launched by injecting wireless signals through the antenna dish of a VSAT terminal. Finally, we demonstrate our software-defined radio end-to-end attacks to inject bogus firmware updates and to gain a remote root shell access on the modem. To the best of knowledge, this represents the first successful demonstration of signal injection attacks on VSAT modems using software-defined radios from the Earth, while previous attacks on VSAT systems such as the ViaSat hack in 2022 were based on exploiting the operator’s network through Internet VPN connections. Our work therefore enlarges significantly the attack surface of VSAT systems.