Johannes Willbold
Johannes Willbold is a doctoral student at the chair for systems security at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. In this doctoral thesis, he focuses on the security of space and satellite systems, with a special emphasis on understanding real-world security issues by studying otherwise hard-to-access space software. His first paper on the security of onboard satellite software "Space Odyssey: An Experimental Software Security Analysis of Satellites" was recently accepted to the IEEE S&P 2023 conference. In 2022, Johannes visited the Cyber-Defence Campus in Switzerland for an extended research stay on satellite security, where he investigated the security of VSAT systems.
He is co-founder and co-chair of SpaceSec, the first academic workshop on space and satellite systems security, which is co-located with the top-tier security conference NDSS. He also participated in the Hack-A-Sat 2 finals, spoke at the CySat 2022 on the academic state of satellite security, and was recently invited to ESA for a talk on onboard satellite firmware security.
Sessions
This talk presents a comprehensive security analysis of low-earth satellites, which have gained immense popularity in the "New Space" era. Despite their growing numbers, the security of these satellites remains uncertain. After introducing the essential architectural components of satellites, we dive into the approach to reverse engineer satellites and exploit their vulnerabilities. Using emulation, we showcase live on stage the exploitation process and how to seize full control of the satellite.