Remember the opening scene of the first Fast and Furious film when bandits hijacked a truck to steal its cargo? Or consider the recent real-life theft of $4 million in gold from a truck transiting from Miami to Massachusetts. Heists like these could become easier to pull off thanks to security flaws in systems used for tracking valuable shipments and assets.

Vulnerabilities in asset-tracking systems made by Globalstar and its subsidiaries would allow a hijacker to track valuable and sensitive cargo—such as electronics, gas and volatile chemicals, military supplies or possibly even nuclear materials—disable the location-tracking device used to monitor it, then spoof the coordinates to make it appear as if a hijacked shipment was still traveling its intended route. Or a hacker who just wanted to cause chaos and confusion could feed false coordinates to companies and militaries monitoring their assets and shipments to make them think they'd been hijacked, according to Colby Moore, a researcher with the security firm Synack, who plans to discuss the vulnerabilities next week at the Blackhat and Def Con security conferences in Las Vegas.

The same vulnerable technology isn't used just for tracking cargo and assets, however. It's also used in people-tracking systems for search-and-rescue missions and in SCADA environments to monitor high-tech engineering projects like pipelines and oil rigs to determine, for example, if valves are open or closed in areas where phone, cellular and Internet service don't exist. Hackers could exploit the same vulnerabilities to interfere with these systems as well, Moore says.

The tracking systems consist of devices about the size of a hand that are attached to a shipping container, vehicle or equipment and communicate with Globalstar's low-earth orbiting satellites by sending them latitude and longitude coordinates or, in the case of SCADA systems, information about their operation. A 2003 article about the technology, for example, indicated that the asset trackers could be configured to monitor and trigger an alert when certain events occurred such as the temperature rising above a safe level in a container or the lock on a container being opened. The satellites relay this information to ground stations, which in turn transmit the data via the Internet or phone networks to the customer's computers.

Colby Moore

According to Moore, the Simplex data network that Globalstar uses for its satellites doesn't encrypt communication between the tracking devices, orbiting satellites and ground stations, nor does it require the communication be authenticated so that only legitimate data gets sent. As a result, someone can intercept the communication, spoof it or jam it.

"The integrity of the whole system is relying on a hacker not being able to clone or tamper with a device,” says Moore. "The way Globalstar engineered the platform leaves security up to the end integrator, and so far, no one has implemented security."

Simplex data transmissions are also one-way from device to satellite to ground station, which means there is no way to ping back to a device to verify that the data transmitted was accurate if the device has only satellite capability (some of the more expensive Globalstar tracking devices combine satellite and cell network communication for communicating in areas where network coverage is available).

Someone can intercept the satellite communication, spoof it or jam it.

Moore says he notified Globalstar about the vulnerabilities about six months ago, but the company was noncommittal about fixing them. The problems, in fact, cannot be implemented with simple software patches. Instead, to add encryption and authentication, the protocol for the communication would have to be re-architected.

Globalstar did not respond to a request from WIRED for comment.

Top Companies Rely on Globalstar Satellites

Globalstar has more than four dozen satellites in space, and it's considered one of the largest providers of satellite voice and data communications in the world. Additionally, its satellite asset-tracking systems—such as the SmartOne, SmartOne B and SmartOne C—provide service to a wide swath of industry, including oil and gas, mining, forestry, commercial fishing, utilities, and the military. Asset-tracking systems made by Globalstar and its subsidiaries Geforce and Axon can be used to track fleets of armored cars, cargo-shipping containers, maritime vessels, and military equipment or simply expensive construction equipment. Geforce's customers include such bigwigs as BP, Halliburton, GE Oil and Gas, Chevron and Conoco Phillips. Geforce markets its trackers for use with things like acid and fuel tanks, railway cars, and so-called "frac tanks" used in fracking operations.

The company noted in a press release this year that since the launch of its initial SmartOne asset-tracking system in 2012, more than 150,000 units were being used in multiple industries, including aviation, alternative energy and the military.

In addition to asset-tracking, Globalstar produces a personal tracking system known as the SPOT Satellite Messenger for hikers, sailors, pilots and others who travel in remote areas where cell coverage might not be available so that emergency service personnel can find them if they become lost or separated from their vehicle.

I would expect to see similar vulnerabilities in other systems if we were to look at them further. Colby Moore

Moore tested three Globalstar devices that he bought for tracking assets and people, but he says all systems that communicate with the Globalstar satellites use the same Simplex protocol and would therefore be vulnerable to interference. He also thinks the problem may not be unique to Globalstar trackers. "I would expect to see similar vulnerabilities in other systems if we were to look at them further," he says.

The Simplex network uses a secret code to encode all data sent through it, but Moore was able to easily reverse-engineer it to determine how messages get encoded in order to craft his own. "The secret codes are not generated on the fly and are not unique. Instead, the same code is used for all the devices," he says.

Moore spent about $1,000 in hardware to build a transceiver to intercept data from the tracking devices he purchased, and an additional $300 in software and hardware for analyzing the data and mimicking a tracking device. Although he built his own transceiver, thieves would really only need a proper antenna and a universal software radio peripheral. With these, they could intercept satellite signals to identify a shipment of valuable cargo, track its movement and transmit spoofed data. While seizing the goods, they could disable the vehicle’s tracking device physically or jam the signals while sending spoofed location data from a laptop to make it appear that the vehicle or shipment was traveling in one location when it's actually in another.

Globalstar

Each device has a unique ID that's printed on its outer casing. The devices also transmit their unique ID when communicating with satellites, so an attacker targeting a specific shipment could intercept and spoof the communication.

In most cases, attackers would want to know in advance, before hijacking a truck or shipment, what's being transported. But an attacker could also just set up a receiver in an area where valuable shipments are expected to pass and track the assets as they move.

"I put this on a tower on a large building and all the locations of devices [in the area] are being monitored," Moore says. "Can I find a diamond shipment or a nuclear shipment that it can track?"

It's unclear how the military is using Globalstar's asset-tracking devices, but conceivably if they're being used in war zones, the vulnerabilities Moore uncovered could be used by adversaries to track supplies and convoys and aim missiles at them.

Often the unique IDs on devices are sequential, so if a commercial or military customer owns numerous devices for tracking assets, an attacker would be able to determine other device IDs, and assets, that belong to the same company or military based on similar ID numbers.

Moore says security problems like this are endemic when technologies that were designed years ago, when security protocols were lax, haven't been re-architected to account for today's threats.

"We rely on these systems that were architected long ago with no security in mind, and these bugs persist for years and years," he says. "We need to be very mindful in designing satellite systems and critical infrastructure, otherwise we're going to be stuck with these broken systems for years to come."