Critical Infrastructure Security Goes to Space: Leveraging Lessons Learned on the Ground

Abstract: Space systems enable essential communications, navigation, imaging and sensing for a variety of domains, including agriculture, commerce, transportation, and emergency operations by first responders. Protecting the cybersecurity of these critical infrastructure systems is essential. While the space environment brings unique constraints to managing cybersecurity risks, lessons learned about risks and effective defenses in other critical infrastructure domains can help us to design effective defenses for space systems. In particular, discoveries regarding cybersecurity for industrial control systems (ICS) for energy, manufacturing, transportation, and the consumer and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) offer insights into cybersecurity for the space domain. This paper provides an overview of ICS and space system commonalities, lessons learned about cybersecurity for ICS that can be applied to space systems, and recommendations for future research and development to secure increasingly critical space systems.