Whispers Among the Stars

Architecture and Background

Global satellite communications (SatCom) provide mission-critical internet access to aircraft, ocean vessels, energy grids, and remote military installations. Geostationary telecommunications satellites broadcast high-throughput Ku-band and Ka-band downlinks covering vast geographic footprints across continents and oceans.

Vulnerability Analysis

Due to historical assumptions regarding equipment cost and atmospheric attenuation, substantial volumes of commercial satellite traffic are transmitted without link-layer encryption. Any listener positioned within thousands of square miles of the satellite footprint can capture unencrypted downlinks without transmitting radio signals.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

Pavur demonstrates eavesdropping attacks utilizing approximately $300 of commercial home satellite television equipment and an open-source software-defined radio pipeline. Case studies across air, land, and sea domains show intercepted corporate emails, aircraft passenger internet sessions, navigational telemetry from maritime oil tankers, and administrative traffic.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

Pavur introduces open-source defensive tooling, including an encrypted satellite proxy testbed designed to safeguard broadcast feeds. Telecommunications operators and enterprise users must mandate end-to-end transport layer encryption (TLS/VPN) and link-layer cryptographic encapsulation across all satellite downlinks.