Over the past decade, the proliferation of Low Earth Orbit satellites, driven by lower launch costs, has revolutionized space applications, from communication to earth observation and weather forecasting. This trend also introduced a shift in hardware: Specialized radiation-resistant hardware was displaced by cheaper commercial off-the-shelf components. As a critical part of modern infrastructure, satellites attract cyber attacks and are subject to terrestrial and space-specific threats, necessitating effective security measures. However, cryptographic protections and exploit mitigations remain limited in productive satellite firmware. Academic research on satellite security only focuses on cryptographic protections, which raises the question if exploit mitigation strategies are suitable for satellites or impacted by space-specific factors, such as cosmic radiation. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of 381 small satellite designs, identifying the prevalence of commercial off-the-shelf hardware platforms in space projects and the availability of ready-to-use exploit mitigation strategies for satellite platforms. Since mitigations are seemingly available, we explore the effects of cosmic radiation on software-based exploit mitigations by implementing RADSIM, an automated tool for simulating single event errors (bitflips). Our study simulated over 21 billion faults in differently hardened satellite firmware binaries to assess the fault tolerance of exploit mitigation strategies in the presence of cosmic radiation. Our results reveal that some mitigations barely impact the fault tolerance, while others increase the error probability of hardened satellite firmware by up to 19%. These findings provide novel insights into the tradeoffs between exploit mitigation effectiveness and radiation resilience, offering guidance to satellite developers on optimizing security in space-based systems.

Solana gained considerable attention as one of the most popular blockchain platforms for deploying decentralized applications. Compared to Ethereum, however, we observe a lack of research on how Solana smart contract developers handle security, what challenges they encounter, and how this affects the overall security of the ecosystem. To address this, we conducted the first comprehensive study on the Solana platform consisting of a 90-minute Solana smart contract code review task with 35 participants followed by interviews with a subset of seven participants. Our study shows, quite alarmingly, that none of the participants could detect all important security vulnerabilities in a code review task and that 83% of the participants are likely to release vulnerable smart contracts. Our study also sheds light on the root causes of developers' challenges with Solana smart contract development, suggesting the need for better security guidance and resources. In spite of these challenges, our automated analysis on currently deployed Solana smart contracts surprisingly suggests that the prevalence of vulnerabilities - especially those pointed out as the most challenging in our developer study - is below 0.3%. We explore the causes of this counter-intuitive resilience and show that frameworks, such as Anchor, are aiding Solana developers in deploying secure contracts.

Return-oriented programming (ROP) is a powerful run-time exploitation technique to attack vulnerable software. Modern RISC architectures like RISC-V and ARM64 pose new challenges for ROP execution due to the lack of a stack-based return instruction and strict instruction alignment. Further, the large number of caller-saved argument registers significantly reduces the gadget space available to the attacker. Consequently, existing ROP gadget tools for other processor architectures cannot be applied to these RISC architectures. Previous work on RISC-V provides only manual construction of ROP attacks against specially crafted programs, and no analysis of ROP attacks has been conducted for ARM64 yet.