SatIQ: extensible and stable satellite authentication using hardware fingerprinting

Journal article

As satellite systems become a greater part of critical infrastructure, they have become a significantly more appealing target for attacks. The availability of cheap off-the-shelf radio hardware has made signal spoofing and physical layer attacks more accessible than ever to a wide range of adversaries, from hobbyists to nation-state actors. Legacy systems are particularly vulnerable due to their lack of cryptographic security, and cannot be patched to support novel security measures. In this paper we use radio transmitter fingerprinting to authenticate satellite downlinks, using characteristics of the transmitter hardware expressed as impairments on the physical layer radio signal. Our SatIQ system employs a Siamese neural network and an autoencoder to extract an efficient encoding of message headers that preserves identifying information. We focus on high sample rate fingerprinting, making device fingerprints difficult to forge without similarly high sample rate transmitting hardware. We collected 10 290 000 messages from the Iridium satellite constellation at 25 MS/s, and demonstrate that the SatIQ model trained on this data maintains performance over time without retraining, and can be used on new transmitters with no impact on performance. We analyze the system’s robustness against weather and signal factors, and demonstrate its effectiveness under attack, achieving an Equal Error Rate of 0.072 and ROC AUC of 0.960. We conclude that our techniques are useful for building fingerprinting systems that are effective at authenticating satellite communication, maintain performance over time and across satellite replacement, and provide robustness against spoofing and replay by raising the required budget for attacks.

Authors: Smailes, J; Köhler, S; Birnbach, S; Strohmeier, M; Martinovic, I

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Journal: ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 2
• Publication date: 2025-09-18
• Acceptance date: 2025-08-18
• DOI: 10.1145/3768619
• EISSN: 2471-2574
• ISSN: 2471-2566
• Language: English