Analysis of Vulnerabilities in Satellite Software Bus Network Architecture

With the rapid expansion of the space industry, there has been a strong push to develop simple, reusable, and easy to deploy satellite system architecture solutions. The space industry may have assumed that the complexity of their systems of systems would make the vulnerability discovery process too difficult for attackers. However, focused research into the design of modern Software-Bus (SB) dependent satellite systems has the ability to reveal numerous vulnerabilities in deployed space system architectures. In particular, our in-depth analysis of NASA's open source core Flight System (cFS) resulted not only in the discovery of various novel vulnerabilities, but also the implementation of several straight-forward, practical exploits. Due to the lack of authentication required to execute commands via the SB as well as the inability to recover from an attack in a robust manner, cFS is vulnerable to a number of attacks through the SB entry point. This paper presents four exploit demonstrations on the unsecured cFS bus architecture, and then provides recommendations on how to secure against these attacks and make a modern satellite system architecture more robust.