Sandia Labs FY22 Laboratory Directed Research & Development Annual Report

FY22 ANNUAL REPORT

SPACEWEASEL: A LOW SWAP, CYBER-ANOMALY DETECTION CAPABILITY FOR SATELLITES.

With increasing concerns about cyberattacks on satellites, demand for cyber-resilient systems is rising. Anomaly and threat detection, the first design principles of cyber-resilience, remain in a nascent state for satellites. Current sensor and detection schemes cannot differentiate between normal failures (hardware, environmental, etc.) and a cyber-attack. To address these challenges, this project developed a distributed sensor in software. The team implemented the software capability, one that can detect cyber anomalies Increased access to space has opened the door to many satellite vendors. The project team identified certain requirements for trusting imagery from third-party vendors and then designed hardware, software, and systems of controls to meet those requirements for Earth-imaging satellites. The trusted hardware provides assurance of capture time, location, and preserves the content and origin by capturing and digitally signing the original data, enabling end users to make trust decisions about the data. The Sandia hardware functions as an independent witness that oversees and signs o on satellite collection activities.

in real-time while meeting space, weight, and power constraints with no negative impacts on the primary mission, and tested it in a Sandia satellite cluster operating system. The solution is novel as it does not require extra hardware to qualify for the space mission and can also be extended for implementation in existing satellite resources by using small portions of extra computing and memory without the need for radiation hardening or other hardware-related requirements. (PI: John Montoya) Anti-tamper, inspection, and veri cation measures are essential in protecting and verifying the secure operation of the team’s hardware. Satellite operators using this approach in their satellites and operations will o er their end users greater assurance in the authenticity of the produced satellite imagery products. The project PI spoke about the work, “On Trusting Third-party Satellite Data,” at the 36 th Annual Small Satellite Conference in 2022. (PI: Sean Michael Crosby)

INTEGRITY BOX ASSURES THE AUTHENTICITY OF DATA PRODUCED BY THIRD-PARTY SATELLITE VENDORS.

Sandia’s Integrity Box architecture provides independent assurance of a satellite collection by signing the data which includes collection time and location information.

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