Space and Cyber Threats

Abstract

Space-based systems play an important role in our daily life and business. The evolution of our well-being is likely to rely on the use of space-based systems in a growing number of services or applications that can be either safety-of-life critical or business and mission-critical. The security measures implemented in space-based systems may turn out to be insufficient to guarantee the information assurance properties, namely, confidentiality (if required by the data policy), availability and integrity of these services/applications, as well as authenticity and non-repudiation. The various types of possible cyberattacks on space segments, ground stations, and control segments are getting increasingly visible and have been indeed frequent. What to do in order to counter such occurrences is less obvious and needs to be addressed with priority and a whole new family of countermeasures. This paper will first introduce ESA and its constituency, and then it will address the security-specific aspects of its space missions. Threats specific to the different types of missions from the cyberspace will be presented, and possible countermeasures will be analyzed. The motivations that may induce some offenders to cause damage to space missions will be then examined. A categorization of the different types of space missions will then lead to the proposal of creating different protection profiles, to be respectively implemented at increasing degrees of sophistication for the different mission categories.

Stefano Zatti has retired.