2026 · Conference paper
SatBleed: Security of Commoditized Communication Modules in Satellites
Studies satellite communication modules through hardware inspection, firmware reverse engineering, protocol analysis, partial rehosting and targeted testing. A component-level threat model connects recovered data flows to security boundaries.
Scope and limitations
Detailed assessment covers three vendors in isolated laboratory setups, not operational satellite links. The reported 28 of 64 active missions are passively inferred as plausibly vulnerable, not actively compromised; encrypted or compressed telemetry is excluded. Manual analysis cannot establish completeness, and vendor-specific findings do not generalize to all modules. LLM use was editorial, not an evaluated reversing agent.
Why it fits this collection
Documents firmware and undocumented-protocol recovery with explicit hardware and evidence constraints.
Publication and review details
- Venue
- IEEE S&P 2026
- Status
- Conference paper
- Publication / posting date
- May 18, 2026
- Date source
- IEEE's Crossref publication date, corroborated by CISPA; October 5 is the later arXiv deposit.
- First arXiv submission
- October 5, 2026
- arXiv
- 2610.06258
- Reviewed arXiv version
- v1
- DOI
- 10.1109/SP63933.2026.00213
IEEE and CISPA establish May publication; the October arXiv v1 is the reviewed full text, not byte-verified against the publisher PDF. The pinned supplement README describes a trimmed fuzzer without case-specific oracles and STIX bundles. Working exploit payloads and the inferred mission list are withheld. No repository-wide license was verified; no hardware, RF or firmware experiment was performed here.
Sources reviewed
Source review only; experiments were not rerun for this collection. Cite the original authors using the linked paper or BibTeX.
Primary sources
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06258
- https://arxiv.org/html/2610.06258v1
- https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1109/SP63933.2026.00213
- https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2026/accepted-papers.html
- https://cispa.de/en/research/publications/213033-satbleed-security-of-commoditized-communication-modules-in-satellites
- README.md GitHub · EmsecCispa/SatBleed · Revision e4d70e4