Hacking an orbiting satellite is not light years away – here’s how things can go wrong in outer space
Getting root on something floating above our planet (or any other for that matter) would seem like a new form of hacking Holy Grail. Don’t worry though, someone’s already working on it – believe it or not.
Because when you break something in space, bad things happen. Just ask any space movie fan.
Who else cares? NIST, for one. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a non-enforcement capacity, is hoping to convene the parties who might touch space code and hardware and provide some guidelines, ramping up some sort of international conversation amongst purveyors of space-bound computers, hoping to keep them safe over the decades-long planned life cycle for orbiting things. Speaking of U.S. agencies, who exactly will have a say about space policies, and do other countries have to agree?
While that’s being debated, Matt Scholl of NIST, speaking at the recent “Inaugural Space Cybersecurity Symposium: Access for Start-ups” security event, called NIST the “calibrators who calibrate the calibrators”, which seems apropos for setting stellar expectations in a security context. And since they have a significant history of trotting out reasonably useful frameworks that folks are free to implement, they do seem to have some provenance in helping to set those expectations and at least get space folks to the table.
What bad things can happen in space?
The first bad thing that can make lots of other bad things happen is to block communication to the device, since it makes it unusuall ..
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