Transitioning Legacy Space Mission Software for Cyber-Hardening

Since China’s first successful anti-satellite test in 2007, it was realized that U.S. satellite assets are at risk, with Gen. John E. Hyten referring to them as “big, fat, juicy targets”. The U.S. Space Force solution is to field hundreds or thousands of satellites in a resilient mesh network, this will make the task of destroying the constellation too great and too complex to consider. As stated by Space Development Agency Director Derek M. Tournear, “it will cost more to shoot down a single satellite than it will cost to build that single satellite. We just completely changed that value equation”. While the ongoing proliferation strategy addresses the immediate physical threats of anti-satellite weapons, cyberwarfare threats have the potential to circumvent it completely. The consequences of cyberattacks range from denying mission capability to compromising the safety of the satellite. This highlights the importance of spaceflight software resiliency; MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers have stated “Humans are unavailable at the necessary timescales. Malware operates at the speed of computation. A human operator cannot respond in real time, especially given that ground segment links are often intermittent and bandwidth-limited”. By increasing the constellation size to hundreds or thousands of satellites under the current satellite proliferation strategy, it becomes infeasible for human DCO operators to respond comprehensively and timely to cyberwarfare attacks. To combat this ongoing threat, the Space Cyber-Resiliency group and MIT Lincoln Laboratory are developing a spaceflight software platform called Cyber-Hardened Satellite Software (CHSS) for “building space mission applications with security, recoverability, and performance as first-class system design priorities.” CHSS builds upon existing technologies, including the seL4 microkernel and Magnetite, to provide a state-of-the-art cyber-resilient foundation, but faces significant challenges in how to achieve fielded capabilities within the Air Force’s stated “three years from start to launch” strategy. The quickest option is to start from legacy software and rewrite it for CHSS, but this is still a many-year effort. DornerWorks is proposing the use of hypervisor technology to accelerate this effort by providing a direct path for executing legacy software on CHSS with minimal modifications. The Magnetite OS can be used to deploy newer and/or updated secured software stacks while a virtual machine (VM) running on the seL4 hypervisor can continue to execute any necessary legacy software in a secured ecosystem on the same platform. This new approach enables the U.S. Space Force to incrementally migrate legacy software to CHSS to continually cyber-harden the U.S. Space Force’s exponentially growing satellite constellations from cyberwarfare attacks by nation-state adversaries.