We have a lot of the traditional cybersecurity you’d expect, protecting our corporate networks, monitoring for threats inside and outside our networks, phishing campaigns, etc. We also need to analyze potential attacks against our vehicles, especially around the command paths and the pedigree of the code that ends up on the vehicles. We have a dedicated team that identifies how our vehicles and satellites could be hacked so we can eliminate or prohibit these sorts of threats when we’re building our vehicles. We also take full advantage of static and dynamic analysis on our code. ITAR mostly limits what we can share – sorry ahead of time if we can’t answer all of your questions. We’re working to get a bug bounty system up shortly.
Jeff
In general with security, there are many layers to this. For starters, we designed the system to use end-to-end encryption for our users’ data, to make breaking into a satellite or gateway less useful to an attacker who wants to intercept communications. Every piece of hardware in our system (satellites, gateways, user terminals) is designed to only run software signed by us, so that even if an attacker breaks in, they won’t be able to gain a permanent foothold. And then we harden the insides of the system (including services in our data centers) to make it harder for an exploited vulnerability in one area to be leveraged somewhere else. We’re continuing to work hard to ensure our overall system is properly hardened, and still have a lot of work ahead of us (we’re hiring!), but it’s something we take very seriously.
Matt Monson on Starlink