A team of academics from Oxford University and a researcher from Switzerland’s Federal Office for Defence Procurement discovered a “kill switch” vulnerability in Starlink’s user terminals.
The vulnerability could allow attackers to affect the physical state of the dish and cause damage to motors and other hardware by overuse. The researchers used a fuzzer to find the “kill” command that could crash the user terminal’s command handler.
While the researchers only demonstrated the vulnerability over a local network, they noted that executing the attack only requires a few seconds of connection on the local network, and there is potential for remote attacks.
Starlink deployed a patch in December after the researchers reported their findings. The paper calls for satellite terminal designers to implement security improvements, including password authentication, using TLS to encrypt management traffic, and only permitting access to the management interface from a dedicated admin network.
