War in Ukraine Highlights Security Concerns for NGSO Satcom

The war in Ukraine, and the hack of Viasat’s KA-SAT network, has highlighted the long-standing geopolitical reality for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) operators who serve government and critical industry customers, and the security issues that come with it, according to panelists at a SATELLITE 2022 session on Monday.

“I don't think the last couple of weeks are anything new,” said Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium, the “OG” LEO constellation, “It’s got some publicity because of the Viasat breach, but the satellite industry in particular, has always understood the fragility of our networks.” With 20 percent of Iridium’s sales being to government customers, Desch said, “We have always been concerned with security. And I can tell you that as a CEO, you're just constantly paranoid that you haven't done enough or you haven't invested enough.”

He spoke at the session on “NGSO Mobile Connectivity Services at Sea and in Flight.” Desch said increasingly the emphasis on security in the industry was moving beyond the core infrastructure. “There’s a lot more activity at the edge, a lot more effort to protect even end user devices. It used to be, who cared about that little piece of IoT data coming from a tractor or pipeline or a buoy but these days that could be also turned into a problem. We're moving much more to the cloud, which has a lot more security features that we can easily take advantage of.”

Security “is an issue that no one doesn’t take seriously,” he concluded.

Hagay Katz, chief product and marketing officer for ground segment vendor Gilat Satellite Networks, noted that it is almost impossible to properly secure a communications system that wasn’t architected for security from the outset. “What you see today is that it is relatively easy to penetrate ecosystems that were not designed from day one to be secure,” he said.

Joe Spytek, CEO of satellite communications integrator Speedcast, agreed that the Viasat hack had only highlighted a threat that had long lurked in the shadows — when you serve critical infrastructure, you must expect to be targeted, he warned.

“I think we've always been a vector to be honest. We just didn't know it and didn't pay it enough attention,” he said. Part of the issue was that operators and others didn’t always have good security visibility into their own networks: “Sometimes the equipment that we use is not the most secure, not the most cyber-aware equipment,” he said.

Spytek also noted that radio frequency (RF) communications, because of their broadcast character, are difficult to secure, at least against eavesdropping. “Very sophisticated state actors can probably intercept at the RF level and there is really not a whole lot we can do about it,” he said.

He concluded by noting that geopolitics is likely to impact the investment landscape by changing the value calculation — especially of governments, who might choose to underwrite “constellations that may not otherwise be financially viable,” because the capabilities they offered were seen as vital to national security. “It's not just about economics anymore. I think geopolitical forces are actually going to determine what gets launched, how they are paid for, and which ones are potentially ultimately successful, so I think that's a big change,” Spytek said.

Panelists noted the war in Ukraine had also highlighted the increasing centrality of Non-Geostationary (NGSO) connectivity to critical applications. As the demand for that connectivity grows satellite operators and antenna manufacturers are going to feel the pressure to up their game, panelists said.

“There's an expectation [from end users that] smartphone apps today are going to work the same in the air as they do on terrestrial cellular networks,” noted Josh Marks, CEO of mobility specialist Anuvu. “The problem there of course, is the expectations of the app developers themselves have fundamentally changed.”

Apps are designed to require not just high bandwidth, but the all-round high performance available on modern 4G and 5G networks, Marks said, creating problems for operators well beyond the simple question of bandwidth requirements. “Applications like TikTok are pigs in terms of bandwidth and very difficult to traffic shape and traffic manage. It's not a question anymore of ‘Is there enough capacity?’ Now it's ‘Is there enough capacity in the right places to meet the expectations of these new applications?’”

Often Marks said, the answer is going to be ‘No’ — at least from the existing satellite operators.

“As use cases transition to video rich social media, I don't think the incumbent satellite systems are anywhere close to meeting those requirements. I think we are moving faster at the service integration and the modem layers to be able to enable that than the satellite operators are in terms of the core infrastructure that they've put in place and I think that's a core challenge that we're all going to have to manage.”

But the coming wave of new constellations will not offer a panacea, added Desch, because some of them likely would never achieve financial viability. “I think it still comes down to the business case and closing the business case. A lot of us are scratching our heads a little bit about that right now.”

Ask how many of the planned new constellations would make it, and you will get different answers depending on who you were talking to, Desch said.

“We won't actually know for probably 10 more years,” he said. “There's going to be an awful lot more builds, a lot more services provided, a lot more competition. Frankly, that's exciting as a user. If you're a user, you've got to be cheering this all on. But if you're an investor, you’ve got to be a little nervous about where things might go long-term.” VS