Science Daily July 11, 2023
Despite its critical importance, little academic research has been conducted on satellite security and the security of onboard firmware. This lack likely stems from by now outdated assumptions on achieving security by obscurity, effectively preventing meaningful research on satellite firmware. Researchers in Germany have provided a taxonomy of threats against satellite firmware and conducted an experimental security analysis of three real-world satellite firmware images. They based their analysis on a set of real-world attacker models and found several security-critical vulnerabilities in all analyzed firmware images. The results showed that modern in-orbit satellites suffer from different software security vulnerabilities and often a lack of proper access protection mechanisms. They also underlined the need to overcome prevailing but obsolete assumptions. To substantiate their observations, they performed a survey of 19 professional satellite developers to obtain a comprehensive picture of the satellite security landscape… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
THE INSIDE OF A SMALL SATELLITE. Credit: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Proceedings Â