SpaceJam: Protocol-aware Jamming Attacks against Space Communications

Motivated by the growing prevalence of increasingly advanced satellite jamming attacks, we introduce and systematically analyze protocol-aware jammers: the worst-case scenario that maximally exploits the protocol to deny service whilst remaining as difficult to detect as possible. This extends existing satellite jamming and anti-jamming literature, which to date considers only conventional jamming waveforms. We find that protocol-aware jammers are significantly more effective than conventional jammers against all major standardized satellite protocols, including when anti-jamming countermeasures in the form of interleaving and adaptive coding and modulation are employed. This performance is possible since current protocols have a cyclic and predictable nature. We assess the required capabilities in terms of synchronization, and show that many of these performance gains can be realized even by completely desynchronized jammers. We experimentally evaluate protocol-aware strategies against both a hardware and software receiver. The results show that over 15dB of performance gains over Gaussian jamming are possible against all tested satellite protocols. Furthermore, we find that the attack can be optimized in simulation and deployed against the hardware receiver without performance degradation. We conclude with a discussion of countermeasures, primarily at the protocol level, to improve the availability of these systems.