"How Nation-States Could Blind U.S. Intelligence Without Firing a Shot": Robi Sen on AI Attacks That Make Space Assets Betray Themselves, Invisible Microsatellite Swarms, and the Bio-RF-Space Kill Chain

Robi Sen doesn't blow things up. He makes them betray themselves.

From a lab in Richland, Washington—in the shadow of the Hanford Site that produced plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb—Sen learned early that the most dangerous weapons aren't always the most destructive. Now, as one of the pioneers of light-based adversarial machine learning and RF exploitation, he's watching the space industry make the same security mistakes that plagued early internet systems, only this time with satellites that control everything from GPS navigation to nuclear command and control.

"Most of these satellite networks are so simple that kindergarten children could take them over," Sen tells me, his frustration barely concealed. It's a stark assessment from someone who invented methods to hijack drones through their radios, pioneered AI attacks that can fool any sensor, and now watches as nation-states race to weaponize the techniques he helped create.

Sen's journey from building e-commerce systems to developing autonomous cyber weapons reflects a deeper transformation in how we think about conflict. After 9/11, when his brother was heading to the World Trade Center, Sen abandoned lucrative commercial work to focus on national security. What he discovered was a world where the most elegant attacks leave no trace, where satellites can be turned against their owners without firing a shot, and where the convergence of biological, RF, and space warfare creates nightmares that current defense frameworks can't even conceptualize.

You've developed novel approaches for AI-based cyber exploitation of RF systems at the physical layer. Without revealing operational details, what's the most elegant attack vector you've discovered that the satellite industry doesn't even realize exists yet? What would it take for them to wake up to this threat?

"Satellites all have radios—that's the only way we can talk to them, besides lasers—and in general, most of them have no real security," Sen begins, setting the stage for a vulnerability so basic it's often ignored. "I think in the early 2000s or late '90s, there were groups of Brazilians taking over naval satellites just to send messages to each other because there were no other communications where they were. That's how easy it was."

The example he cites—unauthorized use of FLTSATCOM, a U.S. Navy communications satellite—highlights just how long-standing and accessible these vulnerabilities have been. In rural parts of Brazil, truckers and isolated communities hijacked the satellites' unsecured transponders, turning them into makeshift CB radio channels. It was primitive, but effective—and a warning sign the industry failed to heed.

Today, the methods are far more sophisticated. The shift from crude signal hijacking to autonomous exploitation marks a major leap in capability. "The thing with satellites has always been: how do I interrogate them and take them over without people noticing, and without being active—meaning I want an autonomous system, whether it's on a satellite, at a ground station, or somewhere else, doing this independently."

That desire for stealth and independence is what drove Sen's breakthrough: systems that don’t just exploit vulnerabilities, but do so automatically, without human input. "Imagine a pipeline where data comes in and an action comes out—like making a satellite move. People spend enormous amounts of time staring at screens, looking at hex or binary information, trying to find something they can use to break encryption or protocols. With most satellites, it's not hard, but it's still not automated."

Automation, he argues, is the true disruptor. "If you can build something that takes in signals and turns them into features a neural network can understand—essentially creating a 'language of signals'—it can then read these patterns and craft appropriate responses. This is a fully automated exploitation pipeline."

But for this approach to be effective in the real world, it has to remain invisible. That's where operational security becomes critical. "You don't want to be constantly talking to your compromised satellite. Satellites are easy to track—everyone sees them. If you're communicating frequently, people notice the RF activity and realize something's happening. You want to operate quietly, invisibly."

So what would finally compel the satellite industry to take these threats seriously? In Sen's view, it would take a public wake-up call—something that can't be ignored. "It would take something big that captures media attention. Maybe someone is causing disruption by changing GPS signals—just slightly off, but enough to create mayhem. Or someone using Starlink satellites offensively in a way that causes real damage. We know Musk's satellites have been hacked by Russia, but you see very little done except patching—that tells you the industry isn't taking this seriously enough." The Russian cyberattacks on Starlink during the Ukraine conflict made clear both the strategic importance and the fragility of commercial space assets. Yet, even those high-profile incidents haven’t driven systemic change.

At the heart of the issue, Sen suggests, is a flawed architectural mindset. "These satellites are alone up there. You can't just jump in and fix them like servers in a data center. They need an overarching security architecture, not just patches. I think that would be much easier than isolating servers in a big data center—though I'm not certain, it's what I believe would be the case."

Your work on adversarial machine learning attacks against satellite imagery is particularly intriguing. If a nation-state wanted to blind U.S. intelligence satellites without kinetic action, how sophisticated would their environmental manipulation need to be, and would we even detect it?

"This is a really interesting way you've phrased this question," Sen responds, clearly energized by the concept. "The idea of taking advantage of what appear to be normal statistical events—disguising your actions in environmental noise."

He introduces a deceptively simple yet insidious method. "Imagine a large area with sensitive facilities. If you're trying to confuse satellites, you make small environmental changes—move trees, relocate rocks, shift vehicles slightly. The way you'd orchestrate this is with another AI—an adversarial system—that understands how the target satellite's AI processes images."

In this approach, the power lies not in any one action, but in their subtle coordination. "Each change by itself looks normal—vehicles move, shadows shift, vegetation grows. But collectively, orchestrated by an adversarial AI, these changes can make satellites see things that aren't there or miss things that are. You could hide troop movements or make the satellite believe facilities are located somewhere else entirely."

The attack surface extends beyond the orbiting platform itself. Sen draws a distinction between what happens on the satellite and what happens after the data reaches Earth. "There's a difference between what the satellite sees and what the ground station processes. The satellite might be taking in imagery and doing initial processing—maybe just marking areas of interest with bounding boxes. But the ground station is supposed to be analyzing all this intelligence, making it actionable for humans. If you can manipulate the AI at the ground station that's analyzing what's coming in, you basically control the entire intelligence narrative." The most dangerous part of this tactic? Its invisibility. "That's the beauty—or horror—of this approach. Everything looks natural. Am I sure it's happened? No. Am I pretty sure it's going to happen? Yes."

Sen points to recent developments in China as a leading indicator of what's to come. "A few months ago, three major Chinese papers came out essentially announcing that China was developing adversarial machine learning weapons platforms. They were basically saying, 'Hey, we're going into this space hard.' They're going to use these to blind systems, take them over, and do all sorts of things. It's their way of attacking foes with very little energy expended."

That public academic shift is backed by a surge in published research. "If you look at the academic papers on adversarial ML, from the early 2010s to maybe 2017, there were very few—maybe 100 papers a year. Then there's this explosion where it goes to a few thousand. During a couple of years, it reached 24,000 papers. That's not huge in the academic world overall, but in this specific field, it's a 24-fold increase. And it was mostly from China."

China now leads the world in AI-related research output, particularly in domains that intersect with military and strategic applications. This sharp escalation in volume—and intent—signals a shift not just in technological capability, but in doctrine.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this threat is how inherently difficult it is to detect or prevent. "This technology is inherently hard to detect by nature. How do you stop it? There are ways, of course, but sometimes the only way to stop it is with another AI—and that just creates a cascade of dominoes waiting to fall. The other thing about this technology is that the attack information doesn't need to be delivered through a digital pathway—no WiFi, no network needed. It can be acoustic, radar, even laser-based."

The transition from your early XML parsing innovations to today's AI-powered RF warfare represents decades of watching attack surfaces evolve. What's the most dangerous parallel you see between how we secured early web applications versus how we're (not) securing space-based systems today?

"In '97, '98, a friend and I built XML parsing tools that we actually sold to institutions like the post office," Sen recalls. "While working on them, we kept finding these vulnerabilities—put a malformed tag here, do this and that, and the whole parser would crash. Every bug you see on your computer is an opportunity for someone to grab control of your system." Those early parsing flaws weren’t just theoretical. In the 2000s, XML vulnerabilities—especially XML External Entity (XXE) attacks—became a critical security issue, allowing attackers to access files, trigger remote requests, and compromise entire systems. But the root of the problem, Sen notes, ran deeper than the code.

"The people involved in creating these standards were all language theorists, physicists—brilliant people, but there were no security experts in the room. Nobody was thinking, 'How will this hold up in 20 years?' It’s funny, because some systems have aged well—like IBM mainframes that are 25 years old. Compared to everything else, they’re fine. They're bulletproof because they're straightforward and simple."

It’s here that the parallel to satellites becomes unavoidable. Despite their longevity and complexity, space systems were never built with modern threat models in mind. "Satellites have been around for a long time, but they have the same issues. People didn’t think about security concerns. And when people do build security solutions, they almost always build them for the past. Everybody builds things to address yesterday’s threats."

He offers a striking example from the corporate world. “I worked for a major brand that rebuilt their entire e-commerce system every year because they kept getting compromised. It was not just a compromise; they wanted totally new experiences for customers. But by doing this, they had a major security issue and a few small ones. When I suggested, ‘Why don’t we build something really good that’s going to last five to ten years, where we anticipate future threats?’ They said no. They’d rather rebuild annually than think long-term.”

The mindset is mirrored in today’s satellite ecosystem. "They’re leaving keys to the kingdom lying around—encryption keys on accessible servers. With this one vendor, they had left their encryption keys on a server in a warehouse. Someone compromised it, took the keys, and brought down their entire database. Their stock tanked. Satellites have the same problem."

For Sen, the real issue isn’t just technical—it’s cultural. "If you think in timelines of just a year, you’re already way in the past. Everything takes forever to build and deploy in space—these satellites might operate for 10–15 years. But nobody’s thinking about what threats will look like then. We have to get to the point where we’re not thinking about now—we’re thinking about frameworks for the future."

That shift requires a different kind of thinking—and a different kind of person. "There’s a reason why certain people who think differently are valuable—even though society and managers don’t always like them. These are the people who push back, who are paranoid, who take everything apart and rebuild it. You need to get these people involved in the process. When you do that, magic happens."

If you were designing a counter-satellite network that could operate autonomously without revealing its presence, what would be the key technical breakthroughs that would make legacy space defense architectures obsolete?

"It's funny how to approach this—it's a problem many people have looked at and worked on. I've done a little bit myself," Sen begins, before venturing into genuinely revolutionary territory. "When you look at it, most people focus on the complex interactions—all the other satellites can see you, they're all potentially threats. The Chinese have been refueling satellites, which is fantastic, but it also means they could maintain control of pseudo-dead satellites much longer and use them as weapons against our infrastructure." That dual-use capability—satellite refueling—has become a defining feature of modern Chinese space operations. On one hand, it promises extended mission lifespans; on the other, it introduces new vectors for covert offensive capabilities.

The prevailing belief in space surveillance circles is that invisibility is impossible. "Everyone in this space will tell you that you can't hide. Maybe you can hide behind another satellite or act as a parasite, but somebody's going to see you. There's AI watching everything in the sky," Sen explains, setting up the conventional wisdom before taking it apart.

"But there's one thing you could do that's really out there," he continues. "There's something called the Casimir effect, which has been proven. My brother was actually the person who started the experimental proof for this working with his advisor, Dr. Lamoreaux." First predicted in 1948, the Casimir effect—a quantum force arising from vacuum fluctuations—has long been theorized. Only in recent decades has it been demonstrated experimentally, opening the door to exotic possibilities in material science and stealth applications.

"Everyone thinks about mundane applications—enhanced GPS, making it jam-proof. But let's go to dreamland. There are things you can do with Casimir-enabled metamaterials, like channeling light. You could potentially create cloaking materials that obscure or obfuscate, making something look more like the background of the solar system—not completely black, but matching the cosmic background."

Of course, hiding in space means more than fooling optical systems. Every satellite radiates heat, and that thermal signature gives it away. Sen sees a solution even here. "All satellites produce heat from their energy sources, and they have radiators or heat sinks to dump it. Everyone watching through telescopes knows these thermal fingerprints—they know who's who. But if you can redirect heat at will using Casimir effect properties—channel it out the back when someone's looking from the front—you become thermally invisible or create false signatures."

That level of misdirection could change the strategic equation entirely. "Even if this only worked for 10, 20, or 30 minutes at a time, that's enough. Time and distance in orbit are tricky—things take a while to go around, but when they get close, they're traveling at enormous speeds. It's really fast when proximity matters."

But the real advantage, Sen argues, isn’t a single stealth satellite—it’s a decentralized, intelligent network. "The best approach isn't a single invisible satellite—it's a network. Imagine a constellation of semi-invisible microsatellites with automated RF attack capabilities, maybe optical disruption abilities. By themselves, they're limited. But networked together? They can share information, fuse data, and coordinate attacks."

These systems wouldn’t just jam—they’d exploit. "You use multiple software-defined radios simultaneously—not just for jamming but for sophisticated attacks. While you're jamming their communications, their CPU usage spikes. When that happens, they might skip frames or chunks of incoming data, creating vulnerabilities for cyber attacks. Add in laser manipulation of their sensors, and you're attacking from vectors they can't defend against simultaneously."

That multi-vector coordination is what makes the architecture truly next-gen. "This constellation doesn't just cover more area—they can cooperatively use their emitters and sensors. Multiple satellites attacking the same target from different angles, different frequencies, different methods. No single point of failure, no central control to target. They could appear and disappear from detection, adapting tactics based on target responses."

Which represents the lowest-hanging fruit for a technically sophisticated adversary: GPS spoofing, satellite communications disruption, or earth observation manipulation? Why is the defense community sleeping on it?

"GPS attacks are obvious now. People understand them. Earth observation manipulation? That's where the defense community has a complete blind spot." He traces how GPS spoofing has evolved. "Early GPS attacks were crude—jam the signal, deny service. Now adversaries create subtle offsets. Your GPS thinks you're 50 meters from your actual location. For most applications, that's within the noise threshold. But compound that error across thousands of users, critical infrastructure, military assets—you create chaos without anyone realizing they're under attack."

But it’s the shift to adversarial machine learning that marks a deeper, more insidious threat. "With adversarial ML, I can make gradual changes to what satellites perceive. Today, a building appears here. Tomorrow, the AI thinks it's 10 meters east. Next week, 20 meters. A month later, your entire intelligence picture of an area is wrong, but every single change was within normal variance thresholds."

The failure to recognize this threat, Sen argues, is built into legacy security frameworks. "Traditional security thinks in terms of preventing unauthorized access or detecting anomalies. But what if the attack uses authorized channels? The satellite functions normally—its AI has just been trained to see incorrectly. How do you detect when your perception of reality has been systematically shifted?"

This is currently happening. "China has published papers explicitly about developing these capabilities. They understand that controlling what satellites see means controlling intelligence narratives. While we're focused on protecting satellites from kinetic attacks, they're figuring out how to make our satellites lie to us."

The consequences go far beyond military operations. "Financial markets rely on satellite data for everything—crop yields, shipping traffic, economic indicators. Manipulate what satellites observe, and you can cause economic chaos. A sophisticated adversary could profit from market movements they create through observation manipulation. Imagine if someone could make satellites consistently underreport oil tanker traffic or overestimate crop failures."

He offers a chilling example. "Think about commodity trading based on agricultural yields. Satellite imagery informs billions in trades. If I can make your satellites show drought conditions that don't exist, I can crash markets while betting against them. By the time ground truth emerges, I've made my profit and covered my tracks."

Your background spans biodefense, RF warfare, and space systems. What's the most unsettling attack scenario you can envision that exploits the convergence of these domains?

"I'm not going to tell you the absolute worst case—I have friends at DITRA who would beat me up," Sen says with dark humor, referring to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. "But I'll give you an unrealistic scenario that could actually happen."

He builds the scenario step by step, starting with biology. "When I was younger, I worked in labs—basically as a clerk, but I got a good understanding of what goes on. One thing that always fascinated me is bacteria. It's amazing in its simultaneous simplicity and complexity, how it adapts and evolves."

What he learned there has stayed with him. "Different bacteria species will sometimes cooperate instead of competing. One collects materials to make sugar, another produces something else they both need. They can form massive architectures—maybe a dozen different bacterial types working together. So I thought: could you engineer bacteria that can survive anywhere?" The answer, Sen explains, is yes. "There's something called extremophile bacteria that can live in environments that would destroy robots—hazardous material tanks, extreme temperatures, radiation. They survive where machines fail." These organisms have been discovered thriving in places like deep ocean vents and nuclear reactor cooling pools—evidence that biology can go where technology cannot.

Then comes the RF dimension. "You can signal bacteria with RF and trigger responses. The ranges aren't great, but you can do it. Imagine dormant bacteria living on thousands of people who don't know they're carriers. They attend major events—political rallies, concerts, sports games. Better yet would be something happening in many places simultaneously." The final piece is space. "You broadcast your RF signal—maybe even from a compromised satellite—triggering these bacterial releases. But here's where it gets truly frightening: first responders rely on satellite communications. If you've taken control of those satellites, you don't just deny service—you inject disinformation."

The result isn’t just biological chaos—it’s systemic collapse. "Misroute emergency vehicles, send response teams to wrong locations, create phantom emergencies elsewhere. You're not just attacking people; you're attacking the entire response infrastructure. These first responders have different communication systems—analog, digital, some satellite-based. If you control the satellites, you can manipulate large portions of emergency networks."

For adversaries, the deniability is built in. "When the bacteria activate, they could be programmed to start degrading immediately—evidence disappearing as people get sick. How do you trace an RF signal that came from a compromised satellite? How do you prove which nation was responsible?"

And the manipulation doesn’t stop there. "Now you're injecting false information through those same satellites to military and government networks. Create phantom attacks in other locations. Manipulate GPS to misroute resources. Use adversarial ML on observation satellites to hide what's really happening while showing false activity elsewhere. Politicians, military commanders—they're all getting corrupted information."

What makes this scenario so dangerous, Sen emphasizes, is that it crosses traditional defense boundaries. "Each domain alone has defenses. We have biodefense protocols, RF monitoring, and satellite security. But combined? Our frameworks assume these are separate threats. Nobody's planning for coordinated bio-RF-space attacks because they require completely different expertise to understand, let alone defend against."

He offers a chilling clarification on the method of delivery. "The biggest challenge with biological or chemical weapons has always been deployment. Release them wrong—say, from a tall building—and they dissipate harmlessly. But if you have coordinated release from multiple carriers at optimal locations, triggered simultaneously? That's a different story."

Then, a pause. His tone shifts. "What keeps me up at night is that this isn't science fiction. Nation-states have 10-year persistence for operations. They can place assets, develop capabilities, and wait. The technology exists—it's just a matter of integration and will."

He closes with a stark warning. "We're building defense architectures for individual domains while adversaries are thinking about convergence. That gap—between how we organize our defenses and how attacks actually happen—that's where catastrophe lives. And satellites? They're the thread that ties it all together."

Author's Analysis

Robi Sen represents a rare breed of technologist—one who builds the future while simultaneously revealing its dangers. His evolution from XML parsing vulnerabilities to autonomous RF warfare systems traces the arc of our collective security failures, where each generation of technology repeats the mistakes of the last, only with exponentially higher stakes.

What makes Sen's insights so unsettling isn't just the technical sophistication of the attacks he describes, but their accessibility. When he mentions kindergarteners taking over satellite networks, he's not being hyperbolic—he's highlighting how our most critical infrastructure often lacks even basic security. The same satellites guiding precision weapons and monitoring nuclear facilities can be compromised with techniques from the early internet era.

His work on adversarial machine learning represents a paradigm shift in conflict. Traditional warfare is obvious—explosions, invasions, blockades. But Sen describes attacks that are undetectable by design, where the weapon is doubt itself. When satellites can be made to lie, when GPS can be subtly shifted, when environmental changes can blind intelligence assets, the very nature of truth in warfare becomes negotiable.

The Casimir effect breakthrough his brother pioneered adds another dimension to future conflict. While most focus on kinetic anti-satellite weapons or cyber attacks, Sen envisions constellations of thermally and optically invisible microsatellites—a permanent, undetectable threat orbiting above. It's the space equivalent of nuclear submarines, but worse because there's no ocean to hide their absence.

Perhaps most concerning is his analysis of converged domain attacks. Military doctrine traditionally separates biological, electronic, and space warfare into distinct categories with different commands, different expertise, different defenses. But Sen describes scenarios where these boundaries dissolve—where dormant bacteria wait for satellite-delivered triggers while RF attacks corrupt emergency responses. Our organizational structures, built for yesterday's wars, can't comprehend tomorrow's convergence.

The defense community's failure to recognize earth observation manipulation as a critical vulnerability reveals a deeper blindness. We protect satellites from being destroyed but not from being deceived. We guard against losing capabilities but not against those capabilities being turned against us. It's a conceptual failure that adversaries are already exploiting.

Sen's parting observation about nation-states playing long games while we think in annual cycles captures the temporal asymmetry of modern conflict. While American defense contractors build for quarterly earnings and political administrations plan for election cycles, adversaries place assets and develop capabilities over decades. This mismatch in time horizons may prove more decisive than any technological advantage.

The future Sen describes isn't coming—it's here, hidden in plain sight among the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth. The question isn't whether these attacks will happen, but whether we'll recognize them when they do. In a world where truth itself becomes a battlefield, the most dangerous weapons are the ones that make us doubt our own eyes.

And somewhere in Richland, Washington, in the shadow of reactors that once fueled our greatest weapons, Robi Sen continues building defenses for attacks that haven't been invented yet—knowing that someone, somewhere, is working just as hard to ensure they won't be needed in time.

About Robi Sen

Robi Sen is a recognized pioneer in AI-driven electronic warfare who has spent over two decades building technologies that adversaries fear and allies depend on. From his early work on DARPA's "Yellowbox" ML-powered RF analysis platform to creating autonomous systems that can hijack drones through their radios, Sen has consistently delivered capabilities that redefine what's possible in defense technology.

As founder of Cognoscenti (2019), Sen develops AI tools that turn RF devices and autonomous platforms into strategic weapons. His predictive RF spectroscopy enables real-time spectrum dominance, while his AI navigation systems guide small satellites and UAS through contested environments. Most notably, he pioneered methods to decode neural networks into human-readable formats—bringing transparency to AI systems that operate at the edge of warfare.

Sen previously founded Department 13 (2002), where he co-invented MESMER, the counter-UAS platform that Special Operations Forces and intelligence agencies rely on when conventional defenses fail. His MIMIR AI signal analysis tool remains classified in its full capabilities. These innovations, along with 31 other patents in RF exploitation and electronic warfare, have fundamentally changed how the U.S. approaches spectrum conflict.

His technical expertise is grounded in historical understanding—Sen holds an MA in Military History from the University of Norwich (magna cum laude), where his research on British colonial warfare's non-traditional methods informed his approach to modern asymmetric threats.

Sen continues to work at the bleeding edge where AI, RF, and space systems converge, building defenses against attacks that haven't been invented yet. For his complete patents and publications, visit his LinkedIn profile or contact him directly.