Talk: Decoding Data from Iridium Satellites

At this year’s hacker themed Eleventh Hope conference, Stefan “Sec” Zehl and Schneider gave a talk which discusses their latest work on decoding data from Iridium satellites using SDR’s. Iridium is a truly global satellite service which provides various services such as global paging, satellite phones, tracking and fleet management services, as well as services for emergency, aircraft, maritime and covert operations too. There are currently 72 operational satellites operating.

In their talk they discuss how Iridium security is moderate to relaxed, pointing out that Iridium claims that the majority of ‘security’ comes from the complexity of the system, rather than actual security implementations. They then go on to discuss how the Iridium system works, how to receive it with an RTL-SDR or HackRF/Rad1o, how the gr-iridium decoder implementation works, and how to use it to actually decode the data. Later in the presentation they show some interesting examples such as an intercepted Iridium satellite phone call to a C-37 aircraft.