This is insane! A few researchers from UCSD and UMCP scanned bunch of satellite links, found much of the traffic is not encrypted, and went on to decode them. It's amazing what came out.

- T-Mobile backhaul: Users' SMS, voice call contents and internet traffic content in plain text.
- AT&T Mexico cellular backhaul: Raw user internet traffic
- TelMex VOIP on satellite backhaul: Plaintext voice calls
- U.S. military: SIP traffic exposing ship names
- Mexico government and military: Unencrypted intra-government traffic
- Walmart Mexico: Unencrypted corporate emails, plaintext credentials to inventory management systems, inventory records transferred and updated using FTP

While it is important to work on futuristic threats such as Quantum cryptanalysis, backdoors in standardized cryptographic protocols, etc. - the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of real-world attacks happen because basic protection is not enabled. Lets not take our eyes off the basics.

Great work, Wenyi Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger and Aaron Schulman!

https://satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/docs/dontlookup_ccs25_fullpaper.pdf