Presented at HackSpaceCon 2026 — Cocoa Beach, FL.
Unforntunally the recording equipment was not working so no recording but these are my slides. This talk breaks down three of the protocols holding low-earth orbit together — AX.25, CCSDS, and DVB-S/S2 — and shows how little stands between an antenna and the data.
Navigate with ← / → (or the on-screen arrows); press R to jump back to the first slide.
What it covers
- AX.25 — the amateur backbone flying on the ISS and hundreds of CubeSats, with zero cryptographic defenses (partly by regulation).
- CCSDS — the professional stack (NASA / ESA / JAXA). A security overlay, SDLS, exists — but adoption is glacial and most missions still ship without it.
- DVB-S / S2 — the commercial workhorse behind satellite TV, VSAT and backhaul. Researchers intercepted live traffic with ~€300 of consumer gear.
- Viasat / KA-SAT — proof this isn't theoretical: tens of thousands of modems knocked offline through a ground-segment compromise on the first morning of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The takeaway
Passive reception has become cheap for whole classes of satellite traffic, active RF attacks are harder (and often illegal), and ground-segment compromise remains the most realistic high-impact path. The ground is in 2026; orbit is still in 1996.