The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook
Exploiting Ground Stations, Flight Software, and Satellite Terminals
A hands-on tour of the full attack surface of a modern space system, from the ground stations that send commands to the flight software on the spacecraft and the satellite terminals that consume the signal.
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- Authors
- Andrzej Olchawa,Milenko Starcik
- Published
- 2026
- Publisher
- No Starch Press
- Pages
- 344
- Language
- English
Read this if
Hardware and embedded security practitioners who want to extend offensive skills into an attack surface that increasingly underpins internet, GPS, weather, and defense infrastructure. Hands-on labs have readers write working exploits against flight software, not just read case studies.
Skip this if
Readers without hardware or embedded-systems fundamentals already in place; this is a genuinely novel, narrow domain built on top of general hardware-hacking skills, not a substitute for learning them. Start with The Hardware Hacking Handbook or The Car Hacker's Handbook first if those basics aren't there yet.
Key takeaways
- Covers all three legs of a space system's attack surface (ground stations, flight software, satellite terminals) rather than just one.
- Hands-on labs produce working exploits against real flight-software patterns, keeping the material concrete instead of theoretical.
- A domain that is only going to matter more as commercial satellite infrastructure underpins everyday internet and GPS services.
Notes
The newest and most novel hardware-security niche in this catalog, extending the ground this collection already covers with The Hardware Hacking Handbook, The Car Hacker's Handbook, and Practical IoT Hacking into orbit. Read those first for the embedded-systems fundamentals this book builds directly on.
What to read before
What to read before The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook →Intermediate · 2021
Practical IoT Hacking
Five-author guide to IoT pentesting covering hardware probing, radio (BLE / Zigbee / LoRa), embedded firmware, and the protocols that connect cheap devices to vulnerable backends.
Intermediate · 2008
Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
A from-first-principles tour of low-level exploitation that still teaches the mindset two decades later.
Intermediate · 2011
A Bug Hunter's Diary
Tobias Klein walks through seven real vulnerabilities he found and exploited, in the form of personal lab notes, what he tried, what failed, and what eventually shipped to vendors.
What to read next
What to read after The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook →Advanced · 2017
Attacking Network Protocols
James Forshaw, Project Zero veteran, on how to capture, parse, and break protocols from the wire up to the application layer, with a strong focus on building reusable analysis tooling.
Advanced · 2021
The Hardware Hacking Handbook
Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn (NewAE / ChipWhisperer) on real hardware attacks: bus sniffing, fault injection, side-channel power analysis, and the lab work that turns a black box into a known target.
Advanced · 2024
Windows Security Internals
Forshaw takes apart the Windows security model from the SRM and access tokens up through Kerberos, with live PowerShell you can run against your own machine. The most authoritative single source on how Windows actually decides who can do what.
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Alternatives to The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook →Intermediate · 2021
Practical IoT Hacking
Five-author guide to IoT pentesting covering hardware probing, radio (BLE / Zigbee / LoRa), embedded firmware, and the protocols that connect cheap devices to vulnerable backends.
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Windows Security Internals
Forshaw takes apart the Windows security model from the SRM and access tokens up through Kerberos, with live PowerShell you can run against your own machine. The most authoritative single source on how Windows actually decides who can do what.
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The Hardware Hacking Handbook
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