To guard against cyberattacks in space, researchers ask “what if?”

Conjuring scenarios

Even security professionals who recognize the severity of this space cybersecurity threat face a major challenge. At least in nonclassified forums, only a couple of under-specified scenarios are typically considered: something vague about satellite hacking and something vague about signals jamming or spoofing.

But failure to imagine a full range of possibilities can be devastating for security planning, especially against hackers who are a diverse set of entities with diverse motivations and targets. These variables are vital to nail down because they reveal clues about which strategies and levers defenders may find most effective in a response. For instance, an attack by a state-sponsored hacker may require a different approach than, say, one by a criminal hacker after money or by a chaos agent.

To help with this piece of the security puzzle, our report offers a taxonomy—the ICARUS matrix—that captures these variables and can create more than 4 million unique combinations of variables, which we call scenario prompts. ICARUS is an acronym for “imagining cyberattacks to anticipate risks unique to space.”

Here are three of the 42 scenarios we included in the report.

A 3D or additive printer can be an invaluable resource for quickly creating parts on demand on space missions. A hacker could gain access to a printer on a space station and reprogram it to make tiny imperfections inside the parts it prints. Some of these built-to-fail components could be parts of critical systems.

A hacker could corrupt the data from a planetary probe to show inaccurate atmospheric, temperature or water readings. Corrupted data from a Mars rover, for example, could falsely show that an area has significant subsurface water ice. Any subsequent mission launched to explore the site further would be wasted.

In 1938, a radio drama about an alien attack instigated a panic when many listeners didn’t realize it was fictional. Similarly, a hacker could access the listening feeds of the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or METI, project and insert something resembling alien language in METI’s transcription. They could then leak it to the media, potentially creating panic worldwide and moving financial markets.

Other scenarios in our report involve such things as insider threats, AI vulnerabilities, false flag attacks, ecoterrorism, ransomware during a launch, as well as more distant scenarios about asteroid mining, off-world colonies and space pirates.

Stories for better security

People are hardwired to respond to stories, whether shared around prehistoric campfires or across digital platforms today. Thus, crafting novel and surprising scenarios can help bring to life the invisible threat of space cyberattacks, as well as spotlight nuances across different scenarios that may require interdisciplinary experts to tackle together.

Patrick Lin, Professor of Philosophy, California Polytechnic State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.