Security · Dish wireless gamepad

What it protects you from

Dish is built to stay safe even on networks you don't fully trust:

A roommate or neighbor on the same Wi-Fi can't sneak controller inputs into your game.
Nobody snooping on the network can see what you're playing or how you're playing it.
A captured input can't be replayed an hour later to act on your behalf.
If anything's wrong, pairing simply fails. It never quietly drops to an unprotected connection.
The settings live only on your own PC. They can't be reached from the network.

Pairing

The first time you connect Dish to Satellite, Satellite shows a 4-digit PIN on your gaming PC, and you type it into Dish on your phone. A new PIN comes up every five minutes, and five wrong guesses burn it, so nobody can sit there guessing.

Pairing happens over a private, encrypted connection. The PIN proves it's really you, and by the end both devices share a secret key that was never sent across the network. The PIN itself is thrown away the moment pairing finishes.

That key is stored safely on each device, locked to your account on the PC and to the app on your phone, and it's never backed up to the cloud or sent anywhere. It's what lets your devices reconnect on their own afterward, with no PIN to re-enter.

Encrypted end to end

Everything your controller sends (buttons, sticks, motion, rumble, the lot) is sealed with strong, industry-standard encryption, the same kind that protects banking and messaging apps. It's quick enough that it adds no lag you could ever feel.

Each message is also tamper-checked, so anything altered along the way is thrown out instead of reaching your game.

When Dish talks to a Sunshine, Apollo, or Wolf host instead, it uses that protocol's own pairing and encryption: a PIN that never crosses the network, mutual TLS with the host's certificate pinned, and an AES-GCM control channel.

No replays

Your PC remembers what it has already accepted and ignores anything stale. A captured input from yesterday's session, or even from a second ago, can't be replayed to trigger a button press.

What you don't have to worry about

Eavesdropping. Nobody on the network learns which buttons you pressed.
Hijacking. Without your devices' shared key, nobody can push inputs into your game, even if they know your address.
Replays. Yesterday's "fire" packet won't fire today. Neither will an old heartbeat or pairing message.
Unprotected fallback. There's no plaintext mode to trick it into. If something doesn't check out, the input is simply dropped.
Tampering with settings. The settings page is only reachable on your own PC, never from the network.

Zero analytics, zero ads

Dish and Satellite collect no usage data, no identifiers, no analytics, no advertising IDs. Besides your controller input to your own PC, an app sends two things: an optional crash report, so we can fix crashes, and a check for new releases that carries nothing about you. Neither includes your gamepad input, which PC you connect to, or your Wi-Fi name, and both can be switched off in Settings. The full details are in each app's privacy policy.

We don't run an account system or a cloud service, so there's no database of users to breach.

Downloads you can trust

Every release is signed and verifiable, so you can be sure what you install is exactly what we built:

A checksum for every download, so you can confirm it arrived genuine and untampered.
Proof that each download was built straight from the public source, not altered by anyone in between.
A full list of everything inside, so it can be independently audited.

The steps to check are in the Satellite repo. If a download doesn't match the published checksum, don't install it.

Open source and auditable

Every line is public, including all the security-related code. Dish doesn't roll its own encryption: it uses libsodium, a widely used and well-reviewed library.

Distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 or later. Found something off? The Satellite repo has our disclosure policy.