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Over the last decades, space has grown from a purely scientific struggle, fueled by the desire to demonstrate superiority of one regime over the other, to an anchor point of the economies of essentially all developed countries. Many businesses depend crucially on satellite communication or data acquisition, not only for defense purposes, but increasingly also for day-to-day applications. However, although so far space faring nations refrained from extending their earth-bound conflicts into space, this critical infrastructure is not as invulnerable as common knowledge suggests. In this paper, we analyze the threats space vehicles are exposed to and what must change to mitigate them. In particular, we shall focus on cyber threats, which may well be mounted by small countries and terrorist organizations, whose incentives do not necessarily include sustainability of the space domain and who may not be susceptible to the threat of mutual retaliation on the ground. We survey incidents, highlight threats and raise awareness from general preparedness for accidental faults, which is already widely spread within the space community, to preparedness and tolerance of both accidental and malicious faults (such as targeted attacks by cyber terrorists and nation-state hackers).

Satellites, are both crucial and, despite common misbelieve, very fragile parts our civilian and military critical infrastructure. While, many efforts are focused on securing ground and space segments, especially when national security or large businesses interests are affected, the small-sat, newspace revolution democratizes access to, and exploitation of the near earth orbits. This brings new players to the market, typically in the form of small to medium sized companies, offering new or more affordable services. Despite the necessity and inevitability of this process, it also opens potential new venues for targeted attacks against space-related infrastructure. Since sources of satellite ephemerides are very often centralized, they are subject to classical Man-in-the-Middle attacks which open venues for TLE spoofing attack, which may result in unnecessary collision avoidance maneuvers, in best case and orchestrated crashes, in worst case. In this work, we propose a countermeasure to the presented problem that include distributed solution, which will have no central authority responsible for storing and disseminating TLE information. Instead, each of the peers participating to the system, have full access to all of the records stored in the system, and distribute the data in a consensual manner,ensuring information replication at each peer node. This way, single point of failure syndromes of classic systems, which currently exist due to the direct ephemerids distribution mechanism, are removed. Our proposed solution is to build data dissemination systems using permissioned, private ledgers where peers have strong and verifiable identities, which allow also for redundancy in SST data sourcing.