Episode 10 of NEXUS is out! Continuing our cyber themes, listen as Blue Origin’s Kassandra Vogel and Aerospace’s Brandon Bailey share how the space industry’s cyber thinkers are using the SPARTA cyber tool and its crowd-sourced insights on cyber threats and mitigation techniques to game out safer space operations in real time and ahead of time.

“You unharness, you unleash all this creative energy that, in fact, results in a more secure capability, and you just kind of remove this abstraction layer that we find ourselves in,” Vogel said. “And it’s also authoritative. So when we’re talking to an assessor or a customer, we can simply say, ‘We did threat modeling using SPARTA.’”

Bailey added that SPARTA’s matrix format is familiar for cyber professionals but with unique depth in documenting countermeasures for cyber intrusions. “You’re talking about attack chains—multiple permutations can happen—and what we try to do is for every time there’s a technique, there’s correlated countermeasures,” he said. “We document the threat landscape and the threats, but the whole point of that is just to drive the countermeasures that we think need to be implemented.”