PistonMiner
PistonMiner reverse engineers anything that looks at them funny. They create modding tools for video games and play CTF as part of team ENOFLAG. They're also a massive space nerd and hack around on cool space stuff whenever the opportunity arises, like Hack-A-Sat, Pwn The Rover, and ESA's Space Systems Security Challenge.
Since 2022 they help maintain some of the older satellites of Technische Universität Berlin by planning experiments, operating the satellites, and developing ground and on-board software, so that the spacecraft can keep producing science past their official end of mission.
Session
In 2013, the satellite BEESAT-1 started returning invalid telemetry, rendering it effectively unusable. Because it is projected to remain in orbit for at least another 20 years, recovering the satellite and updating the flight software would enable new experiments on the existing hardware. However, in addition to no access to telemetry, the satellite also has no functional software update feature. This talk will tell the story of how by combining space and computer security mindsets, the fault was correctly diagnosed without telemetry, software update features were implemented without having them to begin with, and the satellite was recovered in September of 2024.