Optical Satellite Eavesdropping

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential for optical eavesdropping on satellite-to-HAPS communications, analyzing secrecy performance and effects of atmospheric turbulence on security in next-generation satellite networks.

Contribution

It introduces practical eavesdropping scenarios for satellite-to-HAPS optical links and derives key secrecy performance metrics with validation through simulations.

Findings

Turbulence-induced fading affects secrecy capacity.

Secrecy outage probability varies with atmospheric conditions.

Secrecy throughput is quantifiable for different scenarios.

Abstract

In recent years, satellite communication (SatCom) systems have been widely used for navigation, broadcasting application, disaster recovery, weather sensing, and even spying on the Earth. As the number of satellites is highly increasing and with the radical revolution in wireless technology, eavesdropping on SatCom will be possible in next-generation networks. In this context, we introduce the satellite eavesdropping approach, where an eavesdropping spacecraft can intercept optical communications established between a low Earth orbit satellite and a high altitude platform station (HAPS). Specifically, we propose two practical eavesdropping scenarios for satellite-to-HAPS (downlink) and HAPS-to-satellite (uplink) optical communications, where the attacker spacecraft can eavesdrop on the transmitted signal or the received signal. To quantify the secrecy performance of the scenarios, the average secrecy capacity and secrecy outage probability expressions are derived and validated with Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, secrecy throughput of the proposed models is investigated. We observe that turbulence-induced fading significantly impacts the secrecy performance of free-space optical communication.