Forty-one? So who does not have root access to "your" user terminal?
On a more serious note, is this any different from ISPs having a remote management system for ISP provided routers? In terms of privacy, if SpaceX didn't have access to the user terminal, they could still just capture your traffic on the sattelite or the ground stations
Maybe, but in more and more European countries, ISPs are required to accommodate you hooking up your own router/modem. E.g., I am on fiber and if I want to I can hook up my own router directly to fiber with an SFP+ module (I currently use the ISP-provided media converter, but my own router). Lots of tech users use their own Ubiquiti/OPNsense/OpenWrt routers, so no remote management.
I wonder if this requirement applies to Starlink as well, since they are an ISP.
DSL tech is far simpler and it's always a combo unit so I could see a case where you would be allowed to bring your own DSL modem.
But it just doesn't work like that for DOCSIS or GPON where the cable modems or ONTs these days do much more than just media conversion - SIP, PPPoE, IGMP, etc. even if they don't do Wi-Fi (so ISPs don't call them "routers" - except SingTel, which uses "ONR" to distinguish these units because they are in fact routers for IPTV and SIP).
For all of those modems/ONTs, the firmware updates and the configuration for telephony/SIP and PPPoE are controlled by the ISP and also tested to work with their OLT or CMTS so it's just not possible for the ISP to guarantee support for any random modem or ONT.
And to support the advanced configuration required these days for VoIP, IPTV, etc. on the "modem" or "ONT", ISPs basically have a backdoor called TR-069 which is really not too dissimilar to what Starlink has access to with their SSH keys.
Even if you get "true" dumb modems or ONTs which do not do any routing whatsoever, the device on the other side still has full control over your dumb device via the DOCSIS provisioning process or GPON's OMCI. Starlink seems to be using SSH instead of building a whole protocol - because satellite tech is proprietary and doesn't need to work on other hardware.
So, I find that it's highly unlikely that the ISP is officially required to support a user supplied modem, although I haven't consulted the EU laws on this.
At most, I think using your own router would require the EU ISPs to provide bridge mode support, but that's not special to EU. However, the TR-069 backdoor is still active even with bridge mode.
It can be fairly easy to stop TR-069 with a "dumb" ONT (usually SFP) but ISPs can and will notice that. Whether they allow it is up to them.
At least in Finland the norm is that you can use your own DOCSIS modem from any manufacturer, you just tell the ISP your modem's MAC address.
Not for GPON, though.
Not really, when you want to increase the bandwith, e.g. with vectoring[1], you need to have all neighbor modems to participate, which prevent free modem choice for the users.
>But it just doesn't work like that for DOCSIS or GPON where the cable modems or "ONT" router combo units these days do much more than just media conversion - SIP, PPPoE, IGMP, etc.
In Belgium, the ONT is just media conversion these days, SIP is done on the provider box, so you can have your own GPON SFP.
>so it's just not possible for the ISP to guarantee support for any random modem or ONT.
The ISP doesn't have to guarantee support to let you use your own hardware. It just have to give you the specs to use it and let you plug the ISP box if you can't configure vlan of dhcpv6 client.
Ziggo (called UPC in other EU countries) uses DOCSIS. The instructions on how to use your own DOCSIS modem are at the following link (in Dutch): https://www.ziggo.nl/klantenservice/apparaten/wifi-modems/ei...
Edit: it really is using your own modem. It's not about putting it in bridge mode.
Plus depending on model (like Arris modems), I can do things like set the password of the day seed (away from the factory default) to further lock it down and gain management access remotely.
Tr069 allows the isp to remotely configure their equipment which most people are happy with, but if you want to use your own then that’s fine, and obviously unless you enable it the isp won’t configure your router or any other equipment.
Starlink acts far more than a media converter.
I don't think you quite understand how this works.
The ISP controls whatever the other end of that fiber is plugged into. It doesn't matter if the medium is fiber, or copper, or a piece of string. The ISP always has control of the other side of the customer interface. It doesn't matter if the box physically resides in your home or not.
In the case of Starlink, it's all contained within one box.
In the case of DOCSIS (cable), you may physically own the modem, but the ISP controls the firmware it netboots and has full remote admin to the device.
If a normal ISP wants to operate in country a, they need infrastructure in country a. This means they either follow country a's laws or that infrastructure gets seized.
Starlink could just as well be operating entirely from the US, and there's very little that foreign governments could do to stop them if they break some foreign laws. They could make payments and shipping complicated, which is probably why Starlink would rather comply if the requests are somewhat reasonable, but Musk has indicated multiple times that he's willing to stand up to unreasonable restrictions if the need is dire enough.
And you can always go after people - and I mean both Starlink executives and customers.
eg they could outright ban the sale of StarLink products, ya know, being in charge of the laws and all
The problem then with Starlink is nobody is manufacturing compatible third party Starlink terminals, at least yet.
The risk of access to the router is more that they can access your network and touch unprotected and vulnerable things rather than active monitoring.
No, wiretaps on modern networks do not rely on backdoors, or even big labeled front doors like SSH, on individual subscriber devices. Instead it is built into the lower level routing. When an ISP gets a warrant (or whatever relevant document your country uses) they configure their routers to tag all of your traffic and mirror it to a server to be recorded. It’s entirely invisible to the subscriber, and highly automated.
Dozens/hundreds/thousands of web servers servers can easily share one private key in a certificate, public keys offer even more options on sane designs. Directly authenticating 41 servers using ssh-keys is just poor, slap dash engineering.
I wasn't suggesting it, and frankly can't see how that could be a solution in this instance. I was making a comparison against current practices on a harder problem to solve , i.e. safely scaling a single private key in an SSL certificate across many servers is solved today without a 1:1 server to certification ratio
So the terminal accepts "sshauthority1"
Then the 41 remote sites contact sshauthority1 to get a 1 hour (10 minutes, 10 days, whatever) long certificate for "site18"
If a remote site is compromised sshauthority1 no longer issues certificates, and within an hour (10 minutes, 10 days, etc) the remote site can no longer reach the terminals.
Revoking a key from that many terminals (many of which will be offline) if one of the 41 keys is exposed is not trivial.
Now if sshauthority1 is compromised then you've got the same issue with rotation (although can CRL it), but it's easier to secure one or two authorities than 41 keys.
It is not, amd I can't see how my earlier comment can be read as recommending that. This is a solved problem for private keys (using load balancers, for example) , so public keys are lower-hanging fruit than that.
Edit: upon rereading, I cam see how the word "share" would be ambiguous in the context of if a private key. I meant "jointly make use of", rather than "distribute copies throughout the fleet". I have exited my root comment to make my meaning clearer.
Perhaps Elon _doesn't_ have a brain the size of a planet after all.
Not to defend this but curious: Unless the terminal is attached to a local network that also has internet access, the satellite network would need to be traversed in order to connect using those keys, right? What kind of NAT/etc does Starlink use for satellite routers?
I imagine starlink has more than 1-2 sysadmins. I think a hundred pubkeys would be reasonable.
Having some way to remotely push updates, and having some kinda of (preferably with your consent!) remote access might be reasonable, but I would expect that to be via some kind of intermediate gateway/app/something and not direct from a sysadmin’s individual account.
Teardown of the SpaceX Starlink User Terminal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25277171 (December 2, 2020 — 158 points, 138 comments)
Anyone has links to resources about how to emulate a firmware that connects to external devices (GPS here), any ready solutions?
> Android Emulator is downstream from the QEMU emulator. It adds support for booting Android devices, emulates typical Android hardware (OpenGL, GPS, GSM, Sensors) and a GUI interface. The android emulator extends qemu in various ways.
If one is doing 1Gbps of traffic which is 100 byte UDP packets, that's a million packets per second you're gonna need to process.
A 1Ghz CPU only then gets 1000 cycles to process each one...
Very doable, but certainly not easy unless your engineers like hand coding assembly and having to think about every lookup table trick in the book...
The way it usually works is that the initial packets are handled in software but once the endpoints are established it flows through hardware. Sometimes certain patterns are always handled in software. The software could be a patched kernel or a XDP style kernel bypass.
Source: worked peripherally on an Intel Puma cable modem router/gateway that used DPDK or something like it. So I'm not 100% sure, but it is an educated guess.
Specifically for cases of forwarding DPDK-style approach can be faster because it will incur fewer buffer copies.
Starlink only does 25-200Mbps and average packets are like 7-8x larger so at most you're doing ~36000 PPS which is pretty manageable even on 1Ghz
100 byte?? Starlink has regular 1500 byte MTU.