SATELLITE 2019: If you think it’s hard to secure your systems and data on the ground, think about adding the complications of doing it with satellites forming a space cloud. The answer is going to be complicated, but will rely heavily on resiliency rather than traditional cybersecurity.
Jeb Linton, chief technology officer at IBM Watson & Cloud Platform, said space can make it more difficult than the already highly complex problem DoD faces with network security on the ground. “Security in space is different than security on Earth,” he said. “If you lose command and control for even five minutes, your satellite could be completely shut down,” he explained, and “there is no reset button.”
Satellite constellations will be enabled by cloud-based software and high-speed processors to move vast amounts of data in between each satellite ‘node,’ as well as up and down to land-, sea- and airborne terminals. “The question is how to move all that data without creating a bigger attack surface,” Rusty Thomas, head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office’s Blackjack program, said.
One of the biggest problems, he said, is that “encryption technologies used in terrestrial networks don’t scale well to space.” Indeed, the answer is not “to put big fat encryption on the front end” because “encryption is software that itself is vulnerable, according to Ray Richards, program manager for DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O).
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