"Identifying a Vulnerability in Critical Spacecraft Networks"

When two spacecrafts have to bridge a connection in orbit, they dock, which means that the onboard computers controlling their thrusters require an unimpeded connection that cannot be interrupted for even a split second. Movement instructions must be properly synchronized and consistently given on time. Linh Thi Xuan Phan of the University of Pennsylvania, along with colleagues from NASA and the University of Michigan, discovered a significant security flaw in Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTE), an efficient communication protocol that is not only used to facilitate spacecraft-to-spacecraft connections but is also widely used in aviation and energy. TTE enables important systems, such as vehicle controls, to share hardware with non-critical systems, such as in-flight Wi-Fi, without interfering with one another. However, the team's research was the first to demonstrate that TTE's safety guarantees could be broken by electromagnetic interference, potentially causing a catastrophic failure during a simulated docking procedure. They showed that low-priority signals could be transmitted in such a way that the Ethernet cables carrying the message would cause enough electromagnetic interference to allow a malicious message to pass through switches that would ordinarily stop them. This article continues to discuss the discovery of a critical security flaw in the networking approach used in aerospace and other safety-critical systems.

PennToday reports "Identifying a Vulnerability in Critical Spacecraft Networks"