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Starlink User Terminal Teardown
I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go to space. —— Stephen Hawking Starlink is a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet service provided by SpaceX. Users connect to near-Earth orbit satellites through a user terminal, which then connects to the internet via ground gateways. As the new generation of satellites gradually incorporates laser links, some satellites can communicate with each other via laser. This both reduces reliance on ground stations and improves transmission efficiency, enhancing global coverage.
Even on the Ukrainian battlefield where there are no local ground stations, Starlink user terminals can indirectly access gateways in neighboring countries through inter-satellite links [1]. At Black Hat USA 2022, Dr. Lennert Wouters from KU Leuven demonstrated a fault-injection attack against the first-generation Starlink antenna (GenV1) to obtain a root shell of the device. In space security, developers and hackers contend not only in the digital realm but also against the constraints of cosmic physics: one wrong move could mean losing contact with the target forever.
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