UC San Diego and the University of Maryland researchers have reported findings showing that roughly half of GEO satellite downlinks carry data without encryption.

Further, data interception can be reproduced with just $800 of consumer hardware.

Per WIRED, the team captured telco backhaul, industrial control traffic, and law-enforcement communications, and reported fixes to affected providers where possible.

UCSD’s Systems and Networking group lists the paper “Don’t Look Up” for CCS 2025 in Taipei, reinforcing that this is not a lab curiosity but a documented, peer-reviewed disclosure pipeline. The method targets legacy satellite backhaul rather than any single application layer.

Moreover, the study covered only a slice of visible satellites from San Diego, which implies a wider global surface.

Bitcoin in space – new risks from cheap hardware

For Bitcoin miners and pools operating from remote sites, the exposure maps cleanly to one operational choice: transport security on the path that carries Stratum.

Stratum is the protocol that connects miners to pools, distributes work templates, collects shares and block candidates, directs hashpower, and determines how rewards are accounted for.

Historical deployments of Stratum V1 often run over plaintext TCP unless operators explicitly enable TLS, which means pool endpoints, miner identifiers, and job templates can traverse radio links in the clear when satcom backhaul is in play.

The Stratum V2 specification ships with authenticated encryption by default, using a Noise handshake and AEAD ciphers, which closes the passive interception angle and hardens integrity against share hijack attempts that depend on manipulation of upstream traffic.

According to the Stratum V2 security spec, operators can bridge older rigs through a translation proxy, so firmware swaps on ASICs are not required to start encrypting sessions.

This satellite finding does not impl

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Author: Liam ‘Akiba’ Wright