Cybersecurity & Encryption for SpaceVPX COTS-Based Satellite Electronics

Satellite equipment used by both DoD and commercial companies faces increasing security threats. According to J. Barding in the book chapter, Satellite Cyber Attack Search and Destroy, “the last several years have seen a parallel increase in satellite deployments and efforts to purposefully interfere with satellites, jam satellite transmissions, and penetrate components of the satellite ecosystem with malicious code.” The vulnerabilities in the system could allow remote attackers to intercept, manipulate, block, and even take full control of critical communications assets. Suppliers to spacecraft must increasingly be able to deal with these emerging threats. In the absence of unified cybersecurity standards and governance for spacecraft, Novo Space proposes to use this SBIR Phase I to perform market research within the USAF and to fabricate a platform (CPU and Mass Memory) upon which these methods could be tested. The USAF market research will examine spacecraft cyber threats, current cyber solutions, and their effectiveness, both from encryption and supply chain perspectives. Novo Space will also analyze the impact of implementing these cybersecurity solutions in the context of product cost and performance. The computing resources consumed by these security measures will be estimated and measured against the capabilities of Novo’s products beginning with the CPU and Mass Memory. While Novo’s ecosystem of high performance, open architecture (SpaceVPX & FMC) satellite electronics is still underdevelopment, this Phase I study provides an opportune time to build in cybersecurity from product inception. The end product of this Phase I SBIR will include a prioritized roadmap for the implementation of cybersecurity measures into Novo Space’s ecosystem of satellite electronics and the platform to test future encryption algorithms. The completion of this Phase I will lay the groundwork of a Phase II, which would work to implement the cybersecurity measures from the Phase I roadmap. Completion of the Phase II project would provide the space community with a set of high performance satellite electronics which are designed to survive and excel within the current and future threat landscape.