Visible to the public Identifying Attack Surfaces in the Evolving Space Industry Using Reference Architectures

TitleIdentifying Attack Surfaces in the Evolving Space Industry Using Reference Architectures
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsBradbury, Matthew, Maple, Carsten, Yuan, Hu, Atmaca, Ugur Ilker, Cannizzaro, Sara
Conference Name2020 IEEE Aerospace Conference
Keywordsattack surface, Metrics, pubcrawl, Resiliency, Scalability
AbstractThe space environment is currently undergoing a substantial change and many new entrants to the market are deploying devices, satellites and systems in space; this evolution has been termed as NewSpace. The change is complicated by technological developments such as deploying machine learning based autonomous space systems and the Internet of Space Things (IoST). In the IoST, space systems will rely on satellite-to-x communication and interactions with wider aspects of the ground segment to a greater degree than existing systems. Such developments will inevitably lead to a change in the cyber security threat landscape of space systems. Inevitably, there will be a greater number of attack vectors for adversaries to exploit, and previously infeasible threats can be realised, and thus require mitigation. In this paper, we present a reference architecture (RA) that can be used to abstractly model in situ applications of this new space landscape. The RA specifies high-level system components and their interactions. By instantiating the RA for two scenarios we demonstrate how to analyse the attack surface using attack trees.
DOI10.1109/AERO47225.2020.9172785
Citation Keybradbury_identifying_2020