Re: [Starlink] Starlink no longer available to the Ukrainian army?

[Vint Cerf <vint@google.com>]

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On Sun, Oct 16, 2022 at 1:31 PM Steve Stroh via Starlink <
starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> On the battlefield, high power continuous jamming such as you describe
> tends not to last very long. There are special missiles (HARM - High speed
> AntiRadiation Missile) to remedy that situation. They home in on a jamming
> transmitter like a beacon.
>
this is called "ballistic anti-jam" :-))))

>
> One of the stellar attributes about Starlink is that it’s using phased
> array antennas on both user terminals and satellites, proving a “tight
> beam”. I’m speculating, but my guess is that clever programming is
> configuring the satellite beams to be contoured to ignore contested areas
> where jamming is being attempted. An additional speculation is that
> Starlink is programming both the satellites and user terminals to
> continuously authenticate each other’s transmission, allowing them to
> ignore spoofing attempts.
>
> Not to mention that the directional nature of the beams allows for a
> positional reality check. If a terminal is attempted to be used by the
> enemy and the terminal’s internal GPS is spoofed to say it’s well within
> Ukraine (good guy territory) rather than its real location outside Ukraine
> (bad guy territory), the satellite can discern that a terminal really isn’t
> where it’s reporting it is, and that terminal gets (permanently?)
> deauthorized.
>
> On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 13:45 Mike Puchol via Starlink <
> starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>> Pumping out RF at fairly high power levels, and pointing an antenna at a
>> satellite, are both things very easy to do for someone like Russia. To then
>> jam 500 MHz of spectrum all at once is not that trivial, and one can get
>> creative, eg by only attacking the reference subcarriers in OFDM, thus
>> concentrating RF power on those, rather than the whole channel.
>>
>> There are some papers written around jamming LTE by attacking specific
>> resources instead of the whole band, making the attack less conspicuous,
>> something similar could be applied against Starlink. By not using brute
>> force, you also make the attack harder to detect and counter.
>>
>> My view is that Russia is not worried about being noticed, and just
>> applies brute force.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Mike
>> On Oct 14, 2022 at 20:26 +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>, wrote:
>>
>> Juliusz, see the Twitter thread I linked to, it explains precisely the
>> jamming scenarios they could be facing, and how they are possible.
>>
>>
>> I saw it after I wrote my question, and it does explain a lot. Thanks.
>>
>> Do you have an idea how difficult it is to actually do in practice? Is it
>> a simple matter of plugging a second-hand VSAT dish to an old amateur
>> radio rig, or do you actually need to be a research lab of the Moscow
>> Academy of Sciences to do it?
>>
>> -- Juliusz
>>
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> --
> Steve Stroh N8GNJ (he / him / his)
> Editor
> Zero Retries Newsletter - https://zeroretries.substack.com
>
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until further notice

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