A comprehensive literature review of cyber threats and vulnerabilities in IoT-driven satellite networks: Research challenges and future directions

Abstract

Satellite communications play an increasingly important role in a number of different industries with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT-driven satellite (‘IoT-Satellite’ in short) networks have a number of vulnerabilities that can make them targets of common cyber attacks such as jamming and spoofing. These attacks can potentially be highly disruptive to the services they support. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of cyber threats and vulnerabilities with a focus on application areas in IoT-Satellite networks. Cyber threats include spoofing, jamming, malware and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Vulnerabilities in IoT-Driven satellite include deficits in encryption, access control and vulnerabilities in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts. Subsequently, proposed in-depth solutions are also discussed in this paper. Proposed solutions include zero-trust security, software-defined networking, dynamic and context-based access control, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches. While there are limited surveys specifically addressing IoT-driven satellite networks, we identify relevant studies and compare them with our work. Based on these findings we describe open research issues and potential future areas of research. The study suggests that further research is needed to develop a security framework for IoT-driven satellite networks, addressing prevalent cyber attacks and mitigating strategies.