As satellites have become more closely entwined with everyday life and terrestrial systems, they have also become far more susceptible to cyberattacks. The threat of critical space infrastructure being disabled with nothing more than a keyboard has prompted a wave of cybersecurity research in the domain, including a new tool from Aerospace engineers called SPARTEND.

One challenge with space-directed cyber threats is that they are nowhere near as well documented or widely communicated as terrestrial ones. They're just too different, not to mention far more rare.

“There are plenty of cyber tactics, techniques and procedures for land-based systems, but space is unique, so it has to have its own unique cybersecurity coverage,” said Sylvia Llosa, a UC Boulder PhD student and Aerospace intern working on the project. “It’s not enough to know a potential attack is underway or to wait until a critical asset is actually taken down; it’s also important to know how bad an incident can be and how likely it is.”

Thus the creation of SPARTA, short for Space Attack Research and Tactic Analysis, a publicly available knowledge base with standardized descriptions of a range of threats. This allows organizations to discuss and respond to vulnerabilities and attacks more clearly and openly.

SPARTA has recently become smarter. Its developers recently added "Indicators of Behavior," a proactive detection method that watches spacecraft for deviations from normal behavior, potentially flagging them before operators know anything is wrong. And the Detection and Reporting System, or DARS, is another step forward, using AI and statistics to create a dynamic "normal" model of spacecraft and comparing incoming telemetry against that.

SPARTEND — the SPARTA Telemetry Encoder Neural Network to DARS — combines more than just acronyms. The detection system is trained using the library to recognize suspicious behaviors and associate them with known threat patterns.

The library of known threat strategies and DARS as the detective observing a spacecraft for signs of trouble. SPARTEND is the system that trains the detective to recognize which suspicious behaviors are associated with which known threat patterns. This can be operationalized either as a planning and design tool or as an actual in-space security layer, making digital defense of satellite smarter, faster, and more preemptive.

You can read about these systems in more detail at this article, or at the SPARTA webpage.