Cyber Compliant High Throughput Router for Contested Space Environments

Over $1.2 trillion in commercial retail and more than 500,000 petabytes of data depend on space infrastructure. The space environment is changing rapidly and becoming more contested. Current cryptographic systems require too much processing power and bandwidth, both of which are at a premium in CubeSats that weigh a little over 1kg. Meanwhile, a CubeSat can now be put into space for $100k, and Space Communications Security (COMSEC) devices can range in costs from $40k to $2M. As a result, CubeSat developers haven’t seen the need to secure their systems. Of greater concern is the fact that the crypto-graphic certifications of US government-owned and operated COMSEC devices will expire over the next two years, and with many devices nearing the end of their useful lives, the US government is faced with an urgent and very expensive national security problem. As recently reported, a global Starlink outage was caused by expired ground station certificates—a single point of vulnerability. The key objective of this Direct to Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (D2P2 SBIR) project is to produce a small form factor, and low-cost, Software Defined Router (SD-R), capable of securely bridging connections between Government on-orbit C6ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber defense and Combat Systems and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) nodes and commercial infrastructure, and thereby opening up new opportunities for innovators and explorers not currently possible. Technology developed during this Direct to Phase II SBIR project supports Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance and Command and Control (C2) by providing enhanced communications security and cyber resilience for space systems supporting DOD’s global operations. The solution is based on Isidore Quantum™—a pioneering new encryption technology originally developed under a National Security Agency (NSA) Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), neuromorphic space processor, and Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) virtual vSRX firewall. Isidore also incorporates a patent pending Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based auto immune response system for cyber events that follows the human immune system to learn the patterns of life, detects anomalies, and mimic operator real-time analysis and problem solving. Isidore will enhance cyber-resiliency and autonomy of the SD-R and introduce anti-fragility in the face of an adversarial attack (enable the platform to recover from an attack in a better state, because it has learned), trust/authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information lifecycle processes to secure global strategic and tactical communications in contested environments, and in all domains.