Space
Cyber Blog
Australian Space Cyber Quarterly Update II
Introduction
Three months have passed since the last Australian Space Cyber Forum in Adelaide, and the Value of Space Summit has just wrapped up in Colorado Springs (see video below), so it is time to start planning for next year’s events. The first event on the space cyber calendar is the CySat conference in Paris in May and we are keen to see what agenda unfolds for this event.
On the home front we are busy pulling together an agenda for both the forum and workshop for next June. We plan to release this at the end of October.
Australian News
There are still a few events in the calendar before the next space cyber events in 2025.
- 18-19th Nov 24 – USA – CyberSat 2024 – A global Tabletop Exercise is planned for some Australians to attend – more on this to come.
- 19-21st Nov 24 – Canberra – Australian Space Domain Awareness and Space Traffic Management Conference
- 26-28th Nov 24 – Perth –Asia Pacific Space Agencies Forum – this event has a space cyber session
- 25-28th Mar 25 – Avalon – Avalon Australian International Airshow – though not space specific, many of the major space companies attend to display their space and air products.
In 2019 the Australian Army Research Centre (AARC) released a graphic comparing US Cyber Command versus ADF Cyber. The differences are not unexpected for those involved in the domain. It would be interesting to see a graphic of Space Cyber personnel. The gap would be event wider I suspect. This is why developing this capability in Australia is so important.
Global News
Regardless of your views, the US election has wide implications for the USA and its Space and other Military forces. This will ripple through International politics and current confilcts and eventually affect Australia directly and via the AUKUS agreement.
The UK house of commons released a research paper which outlines the purpose of AUKUS from their perspective. The overlap of many of the key technologies with space is apparent, and hence why we have held Quantum and AI sessions in past ASCF’s.
An interesting paper was published by RAND on enhancing space mission assurance. Many of the issues listed are well known. One that I liked was
“Existing cybersecurity frameworks lack consistent definition and space specificity.”
Which is one of the reasons why CyberOps developed the Australian Space Cyber Framework and Aerospace Corporation created SPARTA. There are many other similar efforts around the globe.
Space Cyber Trends
The Space Industry is continuing to be attacked, in line with many other industries, for financial reasons directly or indirectly. The increase in tensions in Ukraine and the Middle East is increasing the use of GNSS jamming, and nation state cyber actions as well as hacktivism by other actors. The rise of GNSS jamming is due to: the rise of commercially available programmable RF equipment and cheap RF amplifiers, the massive increase in drone activity and the wide range of smart missiles being used that rely on GNSS targeting, and the reliance of other commercial and military services on PNT services.
The Israeli use of supply chain attacks via pagers and handheld radios is a timely reminder how important supply chain security is, constant risk assessments and an understanding of how nation states are happy to wait for outcomes are as important as ever for the space sector.
The rise of proliferated LEO satellite communications services and its competitive tension with traditional GEO services has the potential to move the dial on how and where cyber security is important in space. pLEO satellites form networks in space with many more ground stations and links as well. This can cause fertile ground for those trying to find a weak link and require increased effort by those protecting these systems. It also increases the similarity between ground and space networks and so more and more ground derived network security tools become applicable to space. Leading this trend is an increasing trend to look at how Zero Trust Architectures apply to space system security architectures.
Day(s)
:
Hour(s)
:
Minute(s)
:
Second(s)
Day(s)
:
Hour(s)
:
Minute(s)
:
Second(s)
Day(s)
:
Hour(s)
:
Minute(s)
:
Second(s)