Systematic Security Analysis of the Iridium Satellite Radio Link
Eric Jedermann, Piotr Kulpinski, Martin Strohmeier, Vincent Lenders, Jens Schmitt

TL;DR
This paper presents the first comprehensive security analysis of the Iridium satellite communication system, revealing critical vulnerabilities such as key extraction, unencrypted data, and susceptibility to spoofing and jamming attacks, which threaten its security and privacy.
Contribution
It systematically evaluates Iridium's security, reverse engineers its authentication, and demonstrates practical attacks, highlighting systemic vulnerabilities and the need for improved security measures.
Findings
Secret keys can be extracted from SIM cards enabling impersonation.
Most communication protocols lack encryption, exposing sensitive data.
Adversaries can perform spoofing and jamming with modest equipment.
Abstract
The Iridium Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation remains a unique provider of global communications for critical industries, governments, and private users, serving over 2.5 million active subscribers despite recent market competition. In contrast to terrestrial wireless standards such as 3GPP, Iridium protocol specifications are proprietary and have not undergone rigorous, public, and systematic security evaluation. In this work, we present the first comprehensive security analysis of Iridium authentication and radio link protocols. We reverse engineer Iridium SIM-based authentication mechanism and demonstrate that the secret key can be extracted from the SIM card, enabling full device cloning and impersonation attacks. Leveraging a month-long dataset of Iridium up- and downlink satellite traffic, we further show that nearly all signaling and radio communication protocols…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSatellite Communication Systems · Security in Wireless Sensor Networks · Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
