SoK: Space Infrastructures Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Defenses

Space infrastructures are becoming increasingly important to the global society and economy. However, their cybersecurity is understudied despite previous endeavors. This motivates the present SoK, which is based on a novel methodology of five elements: space infrastructures model, missions, vulnerabilities, attacks, and defenses. The methodology establishes an “anatomy” of space infrastructures via the innovative notions of mission control flows and mission data flows, which are respectively inspired by the notions of control flows and data flows in program analysis. We show how the space infrastructure vulnerabilities, attacks, and defenses studied in the literature can be mapped to space mission control flows and mission data flows, leading to insights such as: improper memory allocation and lack of authentication are the two most exploited vulnerabilities reported; Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) security is most studied, mainly via physical layer security; and the most effective approach to attack the space segment is to pivot through the ground segment.