Place Electronic Devices in Maritime Mode - Exposing NTN’s Maritime Attack Surface

The talk opens from a familiar seafaring habit: once land drops below the horizon, mariners have long assumed their phones stop mattering. The speaker argues that this assumption is weakening. Satellite operators and resellers now market direct-to-device cellular service to yachts, shipping firms, and makers of container trackers, so ordinary handsets and IoT modems can attach to orbiting platforms without specialized hardware.

Next the speaker walks through the 4G and 5G non-terrestrial design. A user device listens for a satellite's broadcast ephemeris, which is unauthenticated, then uses GNSS to pre-compensate for Doppler shift and timing. Beam size, received power roughly 24 dB below terrestrial levels, and the ability to reject devices outside served areas are also covered. The talk then maps familiar terrestrial attacks onto this setting: IMSI catching through a rogue base station, spoofing satellite ephemeris from ground level, abusing a congestion control message to block devices for long periods, and GPS spoofing of a few kilometers to break the connection.

The closing section argues that maritime threat models should treat cellular links as part of the attack surface, and that GNSS dependence now reaches communications too. Operators should inventory which onboard systems depend on cellular modems. The speaker also notes that the maritime sector has little presence in 3GPP, where the only maritime participant found was the lighthouse association IALA. Low-cost NTN IoT development kits were suggested for hands-on study.