Sanctuary lost: a cyber-physical warfare in space

TL;DR

This paper discusses the increasing cyber threats to space infrastructure, emphasizing the need for improved security measures as space becomes vital for global economies and sensitive operations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of cyber threats to space vehicles, highlighting vulnerabilities and proposing the necessity for enhanced cybersecurity preparedness in space operations.

Findings

Space infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks from small countries and terrorists.

Current preparedness mainly focuses on accidental faults, not malicious cyber threats.

Awareness and mitigation strategies for cyber threats in space are urgently needed.

Abstract

Over the last decades, space has grown from a purely scientific struggle, fueled by the desire to demonstrate superiority of one regime over the other, to an anchor point of the economies of essentially all developed countries. Many businesses depend crucially on satellite communication or data acquisition, not only for defense purposes, but increasingly also for day-to-day applications. However, although so far space faring nations refrained from extending their earth-bound conflicts into space, this critical infrastructure is not as invulnerable as common knowledge suggests. In this paper, we analyze the threats space vehicles are exposed to and what must change to mitigate them. In particular, we shall focus on cyber threats, which may well be mounted by small countries and terrorist organizations, whose incentives do not necessarily include sustainability of the space domain and who may not be susceptible to the threat of mutual retaliation on the ground. We survey incidents, highlight threats and raise awareness from general preparedness for accidental faults, which is already widely spread within the space community, to preparedness and tolerance of both accidental and malicious faults (such as targeted attacks by cyber terrorists and nation-state hackers).