Sandia National Labs Academic Programs Collaboration Report

Moving target defense for space systems

CONTRIBUTOR Spotlight

Christopher Wright is a full time staff member in Sandia’s Strategic Cyber Development organization, but his journey began in the Sandia Extended National Security Externship (SENSE) program. The SENSE internship allows Sandia-employed students to execute a range of research projects throughout the academic calendar on the Purdue campus. Wright is a strong proponent of SENSE. “As a SENSE intern, I applied my knowledge working on real-world problems which

A project, funded by Sandia’s Science and Technology Advancing Resilience for Contested Space LDRD Mission Campaign, developed a patented moving target defense (MTD) algorithm that adds cyber resilience to space systems by improving their ability to withstand cyberattacks. MTDs create dynamic, uncertain environments that seek to confuse the attacker and attempt to defeat cyber threats. Most proposed cyber resilience solutions focus on or require detection of threats before mitigations can be implemented, a significant technical challenge. The new MTD approach avoids this requirement while creating informational asymmetry that favors defenders over attackers. Researchers conducted three key experiments: i.e., functional, cyber resilience, and machine learning (ML), which helped quantify the benefit of the LDRD team’s approach to cyber resilience against different types of cyberattacks. Results show a 97% reduction in adversarial knowledge on a MIL-STD-1553 network. A collaboration with Purdue using ML to defeat the MTD algorithm highlighted the strength of the algorithm by showing a small change in one of the algorithm parameters substantially decreased the success rate of the long short-term memory machine learning model. Further, the generalizable algorithm led to Sandia working with a small business that plans to use this technology to mitigate ransomware and disseminate MTD technology for the U.S. government.

enhanced and aided in the completion of my degree.”

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2021-2022 Collaboration Report