When the United States and other space-faring nations, such as the then–Soviet Union, began to send humans to space in the late 1960s, there was little to fear in the way of cybersecurity risks. Apollo-era and even Space Shuttle–era approaches to cybersecurity are overdue for an update, Falco says.
Its magnitude is only heightened by the fact that maliciously driven system failures-in the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space-can escalate to life or death with just a few inopportune missteps. It was supposed to be kind of a call to say, ‘Hey, this is a problem.’ ”Īs human spaceflight prepares to enter a new, modern era with NASA’s Artemis program, China’s Tiangong Space Station, and a growing number of fledgling space-tourism companies, cybersecurity is at least as much of a persistent problem up there as it is down here. This paper was not supposed to be groundbreaking. “The reality was that there was zero specification when they had their call for proposals that had anything to do with cyber,” Falco says. “Maybe you might think about securing the communications link to your satellite, but the stuff in space all trusts the rest of stuff in space.” -James Pavur, cybersecurity engineer Inspiration for the study, he says, came from his discovering a relative lack of cybersecurity features in the Artemis crew’s next-generation spacesuits. Gregory Falco, an assistant professor of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins, explored the topic in a recent paper presented at the spring 2023 IEEE Aerospace Conference. Yet, for all the reality-defying situations the blockbuster depicted, the prospective reality of a malware attack wreaking havoc on a future crewed spacecraft mission has digital-security experts very concerned.
The malware- spoiler alert-disabled the invading ships’ defenses and ultimately saved the fate of humanity.Īt least, that’s what happened in the wildly speculative 1996 sci-fi film Independence Day.
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But a small piece of malicious computer code changed the course of history when it was uploaded to the aliens’ computer system the next day. Hope of humanity’s survival dwindled after brute force failed to thwart the attackers. On 3 July 1996, Earth was facing all but absolute destruction from an alien force hovering above three of the world’s biggest cities.
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This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.
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