
Decoding Data from Iridium Satellites - yashinm92
http://www.rtl-sdr.com/talk-decoding-data-from-iridium-satellites/
======
MrBuddyCasino
> Later in the presentation he shows some interesting examples such as an
> intercepted Iridium satellte phone call to a C-37 aircraft.

So Iridium has been cracked, and no reactions so far? Am I missing something?
This sounds like a Big Deal.

~~~
noselasd
No. As with other satellite phones, security/encryption is an additional
feature that you buy. For everyone else, there's no security/encryption - you
just need to implement the system and protocols to tap into it - which is what
has been done here. (And for the parts that have encryption, it's the data
that's encrypted, while metadata (e.g. call setup) is still plain text)

~~~
rsync
Also ... correct me if I misremember ... but I think it is the case that with
Iridium - _encryption or no encryption_ \- Eve can discern your physical
location and get GPS coordinates for you.

Am I remembering that correctly ? I believe that got some journalists killed
in Syria a few years ago ...

~~~
netsharc
I've also read about the Syrian bombs targeting Iridium users. Maybe they used
triangulation to locate the source of the signal that was being broadcast from
earth. Does/did the Syrian govt have that tech? Would they need satellites, or
would helicopters be enough? And which government/supplier did they buy it
from?

~~~
ris
You can probably deduce quite a lot position-wise by observing the doppler
shifts and doppler shift corrections.

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nneonneo
Direct link to the talk -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvKaC4pNvck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvKaC4pNvck)

CCC Munchen wiki pages on Iridium:
[https://wiki.muc.ccc.de/iridium:start](https://wiki.muc.ccc.de/iridium:start)

GitHub for the Iridium decoder software: [https://github.com/muccc/gr-
iridium](https://github.com/muccc/gr-iridium)

~~~
mintplant
Thanks for the direct link. rtl-sdr.com seems to be having some issues at the
moment.

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finchisko
It's not surprising considering age of Iridium. Also I believe they don't make
lot of money, so any development (also security related) is pretty much
ceased.

~~~
iheartmemcache
Iridium is basically only still in business because of US armed forces (and
maybe diplomatic services? though not sure how much field work they do..)
operational dependencies. Editorial retraction, mea culpa: Wrong about the
TACSAT statement here. See parent below for the
[http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-rise-and-fall-and-
rise-...](http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-
iridium-5615034/?no-ist) Post chapter-11 (2000), investors got the _whole
Iridium infrastructure_ at sub-pennies on the dollar. (Literally. They got it
for the price of the _single _launch_ _ (i.e., not including materials, R&D,
labor, etc) of their _multitude_ (60ish) of sub-orbitals.).

Which I'm sure they're selling at absurd prices thanks to Sept 11.

Editorial retraction, mea culpa, #2 [conflated the hell out of ARSOF, again,
see below. The economic analysis + usage of Iridium still holds.] C-37 is USAF
aircraft - this dude seriously compromised his personal security by making
this talk [and implicitly, his identity] public. He's going to have the
pleasure of having SSSS scribbled onto every airline ticket he purchases from
now on, I'd wager.

Iridium was such a brilliant buy. ROI at must be absolute insanity.

@Dasmoth - 64 billion dollars in grey-money was allocated for "Overseas
Contingency Operations" by the Omnibus bill last December. I'm sure
SAIC/Northrup/whoever gets the contract to 'fix this hole' is going to be
enjoying the 800 million they secure from the Pentagon to basically modify
transmissions/upgrade the firmware of the phones to use Diffie-Hellman
handshakes and AES haha.

~~~
jandrese
INMARSAT is a different system entirely. Iridium uses a relatively massive
constellation (77 birds, plus or minus) of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites.
Inmarsat runs a handful of Geosynchronous (GEO) satellites.

Iridium has some advantages. It has coverage at the poles, where GEO sats
typically do not. The mobile units can be small(ish) and handheld. But it also
has some significant limitations. Datarates are in the 2400bps range. Latency
goes all over the place due to the way the calls get routed through the
constellation. Dropped calls are common.

Inmarsat operates a service called BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network), which
depending on your hardware delivers speeds in the 128kbps to 512kbps range.
The latency is always bad (GEO is a long way away), but more consistent. The
terminals are big bulky affairs that range in size from a briefcase up to a
mini-fridge. You can't hang one on your belt like you can with an Iridium
phone, and some require you to set the antenna up and point it at the
satellite manually.

While it is true that the Iridium company bought the system for a song, it's
also true that they bought a massively expensive maintenance liability. You
can't just ignore a satellite and expect it to keep working, they require
operators on the ground to regularly monitor each and every bird to insure
that it doesn't drift off orbit and to handle conditions that arise. They also
have to launch replacement satellites regularly as the old ones start to fail.
Plus they're building out a whole new system. The ROI is no doubt positive
(they've been doing this for years now), but maybe not as much as you might
expect. Iridium's biggest problem was its tiny userbase.

Motorola's whole business model with the original Iridium was pretty insane.
They saw the relatively sparse deployment of cell towers back in the AMP era
as something that was going to last. The only way to fix it was satellite
communications, but the phones needed to be small enough to be used like cell
phones (admittedly, compared to a 1980s cell phone they really weren't too
bulky), which means low power which means LEO, which means you need a ton of
satellites to cover the globe. By the time they finally got them all launched
cell towers were everywhere and people (especially businessmen) realized that
they liked using them indoors (which Iridium was terrible at) and paying only
pennies per minute (instead of dollars per minute). The target audience was
small, and many of those people couldn't afford the system at all.

~~~
technofiend
>Motorola's whole business model with the original Iridium was pretty insane.

Agreed, their original use case made some assumptions that have proven false.
It's too bad Motorola sold off Iridium (and for that matter Motorola Mobility)
because now with Project Ara we're finally to the point of single device
satellite and terrestrial convergence. I.E. You could presumably purchase or
rent an Iridium expansion for your handset much like you can rent Iridium
handsets today.

~~~
digi_owl
Didn't Google massively scale back Ara recently?

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robszumski
Can anyone share articles about how these satellites are _managed_ remotely by
their administrators, and the security around those connections?

I know newer entrants like Planet Labs run normal Linux on their satellites,
and I assume use a normal SSH connection. What do the older platforms use? How
do they move the key material around to the different ground stations?

~~~
tonyarkles
I'm really hoping that the specific name of the software package comes to
mind. There's a super old ground terminal command & data handling (C&DH)
package that is very very common. It runs on Linux, and has a UI that looks
like it's written using Motif.

I haven't worked in the space industry for almost 10 years now, but that was
_everywhere_ when I was there. And I'm hoping that the name will come to mind
over the next few hours and I can edit this post :)

Edit: Success! ITOS:
[http://itos.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.php](http://itos.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.php)

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neom
this is so weird; [http://john.je/hKnG](http://john.je/hKnG)

~~~
nolanpro
At least those guys know it's not encrypted.

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wyldfire
The doppler shift described at ~14:45 was a really interesting component of
Iridium that I recall when I learned about it many years ago.

These guys are great, this was an enjoyable presentation.

~~~
misterdata
The doppler shfit also supposedly provided a clue about the whereabouts of
MH370 after it disappeared: [https://theaviationist.com/2014/03/27/inmarsat-
helps-finding...](https://theaviationist.com/2014/03/27/inmarsat-helps-
finding-route/)

~~~
jandrese
To be fair, that wasn't Iridium, that was INMARSAT. Completely different
company with a very different satellite system.

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digi_owl
That XML they found in the SDB channel seems like has to do with EU and
fisheries. I guess it could be catch reports from trawlers.

And the FTP upload seems to be for the Air Force Weather Agency.

Also, a Mandrake 9.2 install doing a PPP dialup via iridium voice?! The world
is indeed stranger than fiction.

