"Researchers Discover 'Kill Switch' in Starlink Terminals"

In December 2022, Starlink shipped software that patched a "kill switch" in its user terminals. A team of Oxford University academics and a researcher from Switzerland's Federal Office for Defense Procurement discovered the kill switch. The researchers learned the format of commands sent to the management interface of the terminal. Then they discovered that the payload always has four null bytes, a byte containing the command's length, and the command itself. Although the commands use a "non-human-readable encoding," the structure presented enough information for the team to construct a fuzzer that cycled through appropriately formatted commands to determine which had an effect. The fuzzing led to the discovery of the 'kill' command, which crashes the user terminal's command handler. The crash is partially a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack since the terminal will continue to operate as a receiver and modem but will not respond to new commands. Through an attack on the admin interface, a malicious actor is able to change the physical state of the dish, opening up new DoS approaches by turning the dish away from the sky. In addition, motors and other hardware can be damaged this way through overuse. This article continues to discuss the kill switch discovered in Starlink terminals.

iTnews reports "Researchers Discover 'Kill Switch' in Starlink Terminals"