Comment by andwur
14 hours ago
It's a different jamming scenario however. Starlink is comparatively centralised, and reliant on both terrestrial (ground stations) and satellite communication. While the terminals themselves are sparse and widely distributed, the backbone infrastructure is far less so. It's possible to target the satellites, ground stations and critical service dependencies (e.g. GPS) rather than needing to target the hundred of thousands/millions of terminals directly.
The mesh networks are dealing with, by definition, a sparse and widely distributed set of devices which are independently configured and controlled, and in their current widely available form are only dealing with terrestrial communication. Without that point of centralisation you would need to focus on targetted regional jamming, as from a practical standpoint you cannot perform wideband RF jamming over an entire country - signal jammers don't scale that well, and geographic features come into play. As an example you might effectively block mesh networks from operating reliably in a given city, but if people were to move outside of that area then the mesh would operate again. Geography is both a strength and a weakness here: a mountain range will impede direct communication with someone on the other side, but it will also have the same effect on jammers which will vastly increase the cost to deploy them in a ubiquitous fashion.
I suspect jamming LoRa could be a lot easier than most radio though. LoRa signals are incredibly weak and long range. A jammer which jams at a massively higher power level could cover a massive area. You can also just flood the network with messages that nodes will happily relay further for you.
That's a DoS attack, not "jamming". RF jamming usually relies on flooding frequencies with garbage which doesn't get interpreted as valid protocol traffic but does "crowd out" legitimate use.
The protocol-aware class of attack you describe does require some knowledge of the radio parameters being used, since LoRa runs on very narrow bands and uses both time and frequency-hopping to avoid congestion on any one virtual channel. They even apply (very basic) encryption to messages to prevent unknown senders from flooding the channel.
Unfortunately, both systems come preconfigured out of the box to use a default configuration which most users never override. So like cheap FRS/GMRS walkie talkies, all it takes is a few jerks who don't care about common use to overwhelm everyone with bogus messages. If you fire up a new device running the default Meshtastic firmware in any kind of dense urban environment, odds are it will more or less immediately get inundated with spam: "ping", "test", "hello from <neighborhood>", etc.
And since MT + MC both flood the shared channels to push messages across intermediary nodes, they pretty much self-DDoS by doing...nothing.