The popularity of low-orbit satellites for enterprise, civil and critical infrastructures has made the security of satellite communications a growing global concern. As a result, many satellite solution providers are facing the issue and trying to solve it by traffic encryption between user ground devices and high altitude satellites to avoid possible from the ground jamming attacks or even man-in-the-middle hijacking and manipulation, but does encryption really equal to secure?

In this session, we will go along with the audience on a journey to explore terrestrial broadcasting attacks, starting from two academic studies to explore how hackers can find encryption flaws in the hardware and software design architecture of satellite modem products, inject malicious firmware upgrades through man-in-the-middle hijacking and take down the remote execution again after dismantling the satellite communication equipment in a practical manner. We will explore the security costs of modern satellite modulation and demodulation process with its high firmware data transfer capability, the difficulties of man-in-the-middle identification for practical datacom-satellite communication, and how attackers can abuse the combination of these techniques and the possible threats.