The protection of space missions: Threats and cyber threats

Abstract

Space-based systems play an important role in our daily life and business. The trend is likely to rely on the use of space based systems in a growing number of services or applications that can be either safety-of-life critical or business and mission-critical. The security measures implemented in space-based systems may turn out to be insufficient to guarantee the information assurance properties, in particular confidentiality (if required by the data policy), availability and integrity of these services/applications. The various and possible cyber-attacks on space segments, ground stations and its control segments are meanwhile well known and experienced in many cases. This paper will first introduce ESA and its constituency, then address the security specific aspects of its space missions. Threats specific to them from the cyberspace will be introduced, and the possible countermeasures briefly addressed. A categorization of the different types of space missions will then lead to the creation of the different protections profiles to be implemented respectively for the different categories.