HYDRA: Unearthing "Black Swan" Vulnerabilities in LEO Satellite Networks

TL;DR

HYDRA introduces a hypergraph-based risk analysis framework for LEO satellite networks, revealing that critical vulnerabilities often reside at ground-space interfaces rather than the core, emphasizing the importance of edge security.

Contribution

This paper presents HYDRA, a novel hypergraph-based framework with Hyper-Bridge Centrality for identifying systemic vulnerabilities in LEO satellite constellations, highlighting the significance of edge nodes.

Findings

HBC outperforms traditional metrics in identifying critical nodes.

Ground-space interfaces are more vulnerable than satellite cores.

Securing network edges is crucial for resilience.

Abstract

As Low Earth Orbit (LEO) become mega-constellations critical infrastructure, attacks targeting them have grown in number and range. The security analysis of LEO constellations faces a fundamental paradigm gap: traditional topology-centric methods fail to capture systemic risks arising from dynamic load imbalances and high-order dependencies, which can transform localized failures into network-wide cascades. To address this, we propose HYDRA, a hypergraph-based dynamic risk analysis framework. Its core is a novel metric, Hyper-Bridge Centrality (HBC), which quantifies node criticality via a load-to-redundancy ratio within dependency structures. A primary challenge to resilience: the most critical vulnerabilities are not in the densely connected satellite core, but in the seemingly marginal ground-space interfaces. These are the system's "Black Swan" nodes--topologically peripheral yet structurally lethal. We validate this through extensive simulations using realistic StarLink TLE data and population-based gravity model. Experiments demonstrate that HBC consistently outperforms traditional metrics, identifying critical failure points that surpass the structural damage potential of even betweenness centrality. This work shifts the security paradigm from connectivity to structural stress, demonstrating that securing the network edge is paramount and necessitates a fundamental redesign of redundancy strategies.