Re: Security of satellite links into an organisation

[Tom <dod () muenster net>]

Hi,

> Bandwidth in South Africa is expensive and the response times are not at all
> that great. We have decided that a good solution for surfing the net is via
> satellite. One of the SA ISPs offer this service. This would be the basic
> set-up, they supply a proxy (MS proxy) that they propose sits on the
> organisation's backbone network.
>
> The http request exits the organisation via our landlines to a proxy at the
> respective ISP. On exiting we obviously control the connection via the
> firewall we have in place. The ISP then sends the return WebPages to the
> organisation via the satellite dish. My question is what is the security
> risk of this set-up? We now have an unprotected pipe coming into the
> network. Agreed the hacker wouldn't get any responses since the dish can
> only receive (the responses would blocked by the land FW infrastructure).
> What risk would we be putting ourselves at?

AFAIK, it is relativly easy to eavesdrop on satellite communication,
even for
private persons who spent few thousand US$. (It nearly imposible to
detect
these guys.)
An attacker could do traffic analysis, read senitive data and correlate
insensitive data to useful information etc..
If you allow inbound logins via one-time-passwords or use weak key
exchange
protocols for encrypted logins, it may be posible to hijack valid
inbound
connections after the authentication has taken place.

The link to the satellite isn't physicaly protected like a link throu a
wire,
so it's easy for an attacker to attack/eavesdrop on you.

Bye,
        Thomas Biege
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