A Study of Covert Communications in Space Platforms Hosting Government Payloads

Abstract

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) AND ADDRESS(ES)Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CA 93943-5000 PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER NPS-CAG-15-002 SPONSORING / MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 10. SPONSOR/MONITOR'S ACRONYM(S) SPONSOR/MONITOR'S REPORT NUMBER(S) DISTRIBUTION / AVAILABILITY STATEMENTApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited SUPPLEMENTARY NOTESThe views expressed in this material are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. ABSTRACTIn recent years, unmanned space vehicles have increasingly become targets of cyber-attacks. Exacerbating the problem is the desire to reduce cost and accelerate access to space by hosting government-supplied payloads on commercial space platforms. These commercially hosted payloads require stringent confidentiality protection and encryption alone is not sufficient to protect against illegal information leakage on a spacecraft with multilevel security (cross-domain) capabilities. Covert channels may still exist and be exploited by colluding entities to communicate secretly via shared resources. This report describes a preliminary study of potential covert channels in communications protocols used in satellites-specifically MIL-STD-1553B and SpaceWire. SUBJECT TERMS

An Experiment With RTEMS

“…We are currently investigating covert channel attacks on network protocols used in spacecraft that host multiple payloads operating at different sensitivity levels, i.e., spacecraft with multilevel security capabilities. We have identified several potential covert channels in the MIL-STD-1553B and SpaceWire protocols [7] and, since RTEMS supports these protocols, knowing the inner working of RTEMS will allow further experimentation to determine real-world exploitation scenarios and defenses against the identified covert channels.…”