{"id":258553,"date":"2025-10-29T11:08:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T11:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/258553\/"},"modified":"2025-10-29T11:08:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T11:08:10","slug":"ucsd-researchers-intercept-hundreds-of-unencrypted-messages-from-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/258553\/","title":{"rendered":"UCSD researchers intercept hundreds of unencrypted messages from space"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can\u2019t see them. But up in the sky, about 30,000 miles from San Diego, there are dozens of geostationary satellites<\/a> beaming signals to our city and region. They are needed to transfer important data that include cell phone calls and codes that allow remote control of important infrastructure.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut, the signal\u2019s also able to be picked up anywhere. In particular we were able to pick it up just by pointing our dish up here in San Diego.\u201d said Aaron Schulman, a professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego.<\/p>\n

The \u201cdish\u201d Schulman speaks of sits on the roof of the computer science building at UCSD. It\u2019s nothing fancy, a consumer grade satellite dish that anyone could buy for less than a thousand bucks.<\/p>\n

Schulman was one of a handful of UC San Diego scholars, with partners at the University of Maryland, who analyzed the messages they intercepted. They set out to study how satellite messages were encrypted \u2014 turned into code so they\u2019re unintelligible to unintended users. Schulman said he was kinda shocked by what they found and their research was forced to take a turn.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe realized very quickly we had to change the course of our project. Our scientific goal was to see if encryption was used well and now we\u2019re like, wait, there was no encryption! So we\u2019re going to have to go in and analyze that traffic we saw unencrypted and just figure out who this is, and report to them so they could get it turned off,\u201d Schulman said.<\/p>\n

The unencrypted messages included sensitive corporate information. People calling to speak with their doctors and lawyers. Schulman said they got messages from a Mexican military surveillance system that kept track of ships on the water.<\/p>\n

He said a lot of U.S. Navy communications they got were encrypted, but some were not. Enough to reveal that messages were coming from Navy ships.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, deploying encryption takes some work but is clearly doable because every phone, every web browser, every laptop computer, wifi networks are encrypted,\u201d said Nadia Heninger, a UCSD professor of computer science. \u201cThis is a pervasive thing. And so to not have it be universal for satellite communications is quite surprising.\u201d<\/p>\n

Henninger said phone calls in urban areas, sent and received by cell phone towers, remain encrypted. But it can be different if you\u2019re calling from remote areas.<\/p>\n

There, she says, cell phone towers have to relay the signal to a satellite, where the encryption can be stripped before it reaches the person being called.<\/p>\n

The good news, said Schulman, is when they told people their communications were intercepted and not encrypted, they fixed the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cDepending on the organization, some fixed it within 24 hours. Some took a few weeks but, indeed, they realized this is very real very quickly and unfortunately I think a lot of them realized this is ultra sensitive traffic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The research group published a paper on their findings<\/a> for the ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security<\/a> in Taiwan. The headline of their paper on clear satellite communications was, Don\u2019t Look Up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can\u2019t see them. But up in the sky, about 30,000 miles from San Diego, there are dozens…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[79,193],"class_list":["post-258553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}