SATCOM Security & IA-Pre Compliance

Overwhelmingly on the ground. The space vehicle is expensive to reach and hard to modify; the ground segment is ordinary IT — terminals, network operations centres, teleports, scheduling and planning systems — running on commodity infrastructure with remote access and vendor connections. That is where an adversary finds a familiar attack surface, and it is why ground segment security frameworks exist as a distinct body of guidance rather than as an annex to spacecraft engineering.

The boundary stops being yours. Capacity leased from a commercial provider means shared infrastructure, a provider-operated ground segment, provider personnel with access, and a contract as the primary control mechanism. What can be required has to be written into the agreement before award — security requirements, incident notification, personnel and access constraints, right of audit — because after award the only available instrument is renegotiation.

Both, and separating them causes the mitigation to be under-resourced. Interference, whether deliberate or accidental, denies the mission as effectively as a compromise, and the countermeasures — link budget margin, frequency planning, anti-jam waveforms, terminal siting, alternate paths — are engineering decisions taken long before the interference occurs. Treating availability as an operational concern rather than a security objective typically means it is not designed for.

Authentication of commands and disciplined key management, designed in before launch, because on-orbit remediation options are narrow. The properties that matter are that the vehicle accepts commands only from an authenticated source, that keys can be managed across the mission's life, and that the ground systems permitted to originate commands are tightly bounded and monitored. Unlike a ground system, a design deficiency here cannot generally be patched out after the fact.

No. A provider's authorization covers the provider's system as they described and bounded it. The user's own mission system — terminals, the networks behind them, the data once it lands — sits outside that boundary and requires its own authorization, with the provider's controls treated as inherited where they are documented as inheritable. Assuming the provider's authorization extends downstream is the same inheritance error that appears with cloud platforms, at a longer procurement timescale.