The increasing reliance of the U.S. Government and industry on satellites for operational capabilities has thrust space cybersecurity to the forefront of our nation’s overall national security posture. Relying solely on encrypted communications links to protect critical assets is no longer sufficient.​

Emergent is employing a “Defense-in-Depth” approach to research and develop new space cybersecurity technology for spacecraft that leverages our existing Gear, Guardian, and Cirrus products. ​

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Image courtesy of The Aerospace Corporation

Space cybersecurity capabilities we are researching include:​

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- Providing executable code protections for common cyber attacks, to include memory corruption vulnerabilities, return/jump oriented programming attacks, supply chain attacks, and zero-day attacks​

- Trusted firmware responsible for lifecycle management of applications ​

- Protections on the command link via fault detection algorithms ​

- Detection of off-nominal operations and constraint violations​

- Detection of poorly performing tasks and potential denial of service attacks​

- Providing encryption for messaging and data at rest, including public/private key management​

- Providing access control lists to filter message traffic between space applications on the middleware, hardware interfaces, and cross-linked vehicles​

Emergent is also working with Government partners to support operations compliant with NIST SP 800-53 and DoD and NASA security policies.