Conference item
Firefly: spoofing Earth observation satellite data through radio overshadowing
- Abstract:
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Data from Earth Observation satellites has become crucial in private enterprises, research applications, and in coordinating national responses to events such as forest fires. These purposes are supported by data derived from a variety of satellites, some of which do not secure the wireless downlink channel effectively. This opens the door for modern adversaries to conduct spoofing attacks by overshadowing the signal with commercially available radio equipment.
In this paper, we assess the vulnerability of current Earth Observation systems to spoofing attacks conducted at the physical layer. The effect of these attacks is amplified since the data is received at dedicated ground stations and distributed to hundreds of downstream systems, which are themselves not designed with security in mind. Specifically, we take NASA’s live forest fire detection system as a case study, and demonstrate that the attacker can achieve arbitrary manipulation of fires in the derived dataset to trigger false emergency responses or mislead crisis analysis. We also assess the attack surface presented by ground station software which implicitly trusts data from the RF port. Against the NASA system we uncover several new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to stealthily deny service.
We conclude with a discussion of physical-layer counter-measures to detect and defend against spoofing, which can be implemented in existing deployments at the ground station.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
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(Preview, Accepted manuscript, pdf, 1.8MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.14722/spacesec.2023.231879
Authors
- Publisher:
- Internet Society
- Series:
- NDSS Symposium 2023
- Publication date:
- 2023-06-30
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-04-18
- Event title:
- NDSS Workshop on Security of Space and Satellite Systems
- Event location:
- San Diego, CA, USA
- Event website:
- https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-program/spacesec-2023/
- Event start date:
- 2023-02-27
- Event end date:
- 2023-03-03
- DOI:
- ISBN:
- 1-891562-89-4
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1339512
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1339512
- Deposit date:
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2023-05-02
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Salkield et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © 2023 by the Internet Society. All rights reserved. The Internet Society owns the copyright for this publication and the copyrights to the individual papers are retained by their respective author[s].
- Notes:
- This is the accepted manuscript version of the article. The final version is available from the publisher at: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/auto-draft-410/
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