According to a report from Ukrainian website Defense Express, Russian drones are now actively using Starlink hardware for “unlimited” communication over Ukraine’s territory. This past week, Kyiv’s defense forces shot down 28 drones sent as part of Russia’s attack on the Kharkiv region, and some Starlink-branded equipment was seen among the wreckage for the first time.
It’s really not all that difficult from a technical perspective. All that Ukraine or Starlink would need to do is keep track of the MACs in use, blacklisting those which have been lost or destroyed. Some would slip through, but it’s better than not doing it at all.
Of course, with Musk being pro-Russian, I don’t expect Starlink to help Ukraine out any more than they have to for optics.
I’ll go ahead and reply to you, @[email protected] and @[email protected] at the same time since you all three had the same idea.
A whitelist of authorized MAC addresses is easy from a “technical” prospective. It would simply be a looong list of 48 bit addresses but you are ignoring the massive challenge of managing that list.
Making this work would require the Ukrainian Government to setup an official StarLink registration process for every StarLink system in the country, including the ones that are privately owned. Then once a SL system was registered with the Government SL would have to setup a whole separate system to process those registrations.
Now you also need the opposite. Every time that a registered system shouldn’t be used because it was destroyed or someone stopped paying their bill the Ukrainian Government would have to process that and send it StarLink to have it de-authorized.
So no it’s not at all difficult from a “technical” perspective but doing this would require stomping privacy rights into a mudhole and without perfect execution across a warzone the size of a nation it will do little to nothing to solve the problem.
If this was a practical solution Ukraine would have already requested that StarLink make it happen. The fact that the really smart people in Ukraine haven’t asked for this means that they’ve already dismissed the idea as unpalatable, unworkable or both.
As I said in my other comment, Ukraine is under martial law. Privacy rights are low on the list at the moment due to Russians invading and killing citizens. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to save lives.
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What mental gymnastics did you have to perform to believe Russia entering Ukraine is somehow Ukraine starting the war?
That’s like saying you started a fight when I’m the one who just sucker punched you first.
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Couldn’t they just spoof the MAC of the Ukrainian link?
I’d hope that Starlink devices have attestation to prevent MAC spoofing.
You think it’s easy to keep track of tens of thousands of relatively small networking devices in a warzone? What about Starlink kits smuggled in through third countries?