SSITH: Secure Space Infrastructure with Trust metrics backed by Hardware

The accelerated growth of space systems internationally has prompted the need for robust security for these astronautical platforms, especially with respect to communications. A key hallmark of security is the concept of trust. The concept of trust is complex, with definitions including other notions such as the information security triad, confidentiality, integrity, and availability, to topics covering ability, reliability, or other aspects of a system. The issue of trust management, especially in space information systems, is a forefront issue in space cybersecurity. This study aims to provide trust management for interactions between platforms within a space network, such as the Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks [1], by providing a trust metric that is based on data and hardware security primitives available on current and future generation platforms. This metric could be used to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) of a routing algorithm, such as Contact Graph Routing [2]. This trust management approach aims to provide the trustworthiness knowledge of each platform neighbor’s capability and security at a discrete point in time, without the need to use historical trust and interaction data. To provide a hardware backed assurance to the trust metric we look at current hardware capabilities that are or can be fielded to space platforms. We then test this trust management through the creation of a scale-free network, leveraging the Barabasi-Albert model [3] and include edge weights on the network corresponding to a simulated trust score of each platform. Using an epidemic spreading model, as proposed in Epidemics on Networks [4], we simulate the infection of unreliable nodes across the network, prompting the recalculation of trust metrics, and determine the shortest- path between random nodes u and v in the network for each time-step. Our preliminary results suggest that our trust-based routing algorithm is able to dynamically adapt to disturbances to trust relationships in the network.