I would guess the business model is 'pay us and we'll give you the encryption key to our coded transmissions'.

Those coded transmissions are far harder to jam unless you have the key. So it's all about selling to as many customers as possible whilst having not a single customer leak the key.

That's why militaries use keys that rotate daily and won't let anyone else use the military signal.

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amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why wouldn't they use public key cryptography for that?

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londons_explore an hour ago | parent [-]

Your satellite doesn't want to be sending out lots of different signals - due to a limited power budget.

So you have to send out one (or maybe a couple) of signals protected by a key.

Yes, you can distribute that key individually to clients using public key cryptography over the same link (and many services like pay TV do exactly that).

But fundamentally any client who is able to decrypt the main stream can also share the key with someone evil who can use that info to jam the same stream.

	▲	mjmas an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> jam the same stream. To add to that, other people won't be able to spoof the original stream (as that needs the private key), but instead only jam it. It would be the same failure mode as SSL certificates.

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XorNot an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

No they're harder to spoof. Jamming is easy, but requires more power to achieve a desired effect and as they note they're planning to operate a low altitude constellation with closer transmitters as a result, so harder to swamp the signal for the receiver.