IST LUNCH BUNCH

Abstract:

Space assets such as satellites, drones and spacecraft are increasingly attractive targets for adversaries ranging from individual hackers, to hacker groups and nation states. Recent incidents such as the hijacking of the NASA Global Hawk drone by the AnonSec hacker group, malicious control of U.S. Terra and Landsat-7 satellites by the Chinese military, and data outages in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather system caused by Chinese hackers demonstrate the significant consequences of cyber-attacks against such assets, and the inherent challenges for cyber security.  In this talk, we will present the work being done by the Cyber Defense Engineering and Research (CDER) group at JPL in addressing such challenges as pertaining to JPL's missions.  We will first explore cybersecurity threats against space assets, discuss the challenges in securing such assets, and then layout the research opportunities in this increasingly important area. We will talk about two of our current research initiatives in anomaly detection, and modeling for risk assessment, and demonstrate the tool we built for cyber risk assessment of JPL's missions. We will conclude our talk with an overview of the near-term and long-term research goals of our group.