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Pentagon working with SpaceX to cut off Russian military's illicit use of Starlink internet (spacenews.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/spacex

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

, the Pentagon’s deputy chief of space policy, on whether SpaceX has been cooperating to ensure Russian troops do not operate Starlink terminals obtained from black markets in violation of U.S. sanctions.

How is it that easy to use Starlink in an area where they've been provisioned for military use? Those terminals don't have crypto? No 2FA or other type of authentication mechanism?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I assume they aren't just getting the terminals, but authenticated terminals.
Could probably make a lot of money buying a starlink subscription and selling it to Russia. If it's use by russians was traced back to you, I'd imagine you would be in a lot of trouble... But that's the black market in general.
By the time black market profiteers use stolen identities and credit cards, coerce people to do things and all that, authorised terminals are probably no different than weapons.

At which point, starlink needs to determine legit terminals versus blackmarket terminals, which probably isn't as easy as it sounds.
Especially considering Elmo's apparent (or claimed) libertarian/free-speech leanings. I don't know that they would hyper-document things that would be helpful for tracing the entire lifetime and chain of custody of a single terminal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

which probably isn’t as easy as it sounds.

For commercial uses, yeah. But I kind of assumed terminals provisioned for military use (or use in military operation zones) would require more authentication. Like cryptographic keys (daily, weekly), or 2FA on each use with hardware tokens. Otherwise any captured terminals could simply be used to spy or disrupt Ukranian operations.