If a third party can break into the satellite and communications firmware of two different spacefaring nations (you have to hijack an orbiter too) then there are bigger problems to worry about. The number of countries (counting the ESA as one big country) with objects in orbit around Mars can be counted on one hand.

Well, I asked people who are world class competitive security competitors and had succes in HACK A SAT how's the satelites and stuff security and they said that it aint good

On the other hand, I’m not sure satellites launched years ago have auto-upgrades enabled and up-to-date security policies (and certificates!), especially upgrade policies for the embedded chipsets. That must be an interesting problem to solve.

True. I'm not saying they should be worried about that at all, but it seems like something somebody might be worried about anyway.

That occurred to me as well, but I imagine this is separated from the communications.

Maybe it's not controlled at all... it does say autonomous, after all.

I imagine all commands have to get signed for the rover to accept them, but even if their keys were compromised and some vulnerability was found in the software, wouldn't you also need a network of really big dishes (see DSN) to actually send the commands to the rover?

> Wouldn’t you also need a big network of dishes

Nah, you can subscribe to big-dishes-on-demand using AWS Ground Station.

Wait, they did exactly that: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

While some innovate, once again AWS reaps the margins of the whole space conquest by discretely providing the infrastructure that everyone needs. Clever!

I honestly chuckled because of your AWS parody.

Than I clicked the link...

Same. Now I'm wondering what they're not offering.

Reminds me of this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48743043