{"id":69896,"date":"2016-09-22T21:25:33","date_gmt":"2016-09-22T13:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/dod-heightens-importance-of-cybersecurity-in-future-ground-systems\/"},"modified":"2016-09-22T21:25:33","modified_gmt":"2016-09-22T13:25:33","slug":"dod-heightens-importance-of-cybersecurity-in-future-ground-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/dod-heightens-importance-of-cybersecurity-in-future-ground-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"DOD Heightens Importance of Cybersecurity in Future Ground Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

[Via Satellite 09-22-2016] The U.S. Department of Defense <\/strong>(DOD) wants to make sure its future ground system for government satellites, known as the Enterprise Ground Segment (EGS), makes cybersecurity a much bigger priority compared to the approach taken with ground systems currently in use. Today, DOD ground systems for military satellite programs all run separate from each other. EGS will seek to unify ground segment operations onto a single comprehensive system, but DOD does not want to make that system into a jackpot hack for intruders who could see it as an opportunity to get into every military satellite system at once.<\/p>\n

Speaking Sept. 22 at a Mitchell Institute<\/strong> event, Colonel Brian Bracey, chief architect at the Advanced Systems and Development Directorate of Air Force Space Command <\/strong>(AFSPC), said all of today\u2019s DOD programs of record have the same problems in regard to cyber, and that the current defense strategy relies heavily on what DOD perceives to be the system\u2019s greatness weakness: dissimilarity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best term I\u2019ve heard right now, is that right now we have resilience through diversity, which means that everyone of the systems is different, but every one of those is exposed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The military desires to move away from siloed, or \u201cstovepiped\u201d ground segments for different satellite systems, finding this approach to be costly and cumbersome. The goal of EGS is to unite these disparate operations into one single system. DOD is aware, however, of the lure that could create for potential hackers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you aggregate all the satellites onto one network, you just created a great big target,\u201d said Colonel John Anttonen, director of the Advanced Systems and Development Directorate and commander of Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) Detachment 1. \u201cSo what are you going to do about it? When we look at cyber defense and the way we approach those today, we have to change what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bracey said DOD wants to reduce the \u201ccyber surface attack area\u201d of military ground systems to reduce the number of vulnerabilities intruders could exploit. DOD ground systems are exposed through \u201ca tremendous number of attack vector points,\u201d Bracey said, because different systems each have different characteristics, contractors and personnel to operate them. As a result, the entire system gets too unwieldy to effectively protect.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now we don\u2019t know what we\u2019re not defending because there are so many different things that are out, and we don\u2019t have the manpower and the tools to put across there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Bracey said the sustainment costs of operating separate systems are getting difficult for DOD to afford. With GPS, for example, he said there is the potential risk of having four separate ground infrastructures at Schriever Air Force Base, because DOD does not scrap legacy gear until it is fully confirmed that new systems will work. GPS already has two different ground systems, and because of the high-profile delays with implementing Raytheon<\/strong>\u2019s next generation Operational Control System (OCX), there is an interim solution as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s four different sets of racks, that\u2019s four different sets of contracts in some cases, that\u2019s four different sets of system administrators, that\u2019s [Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning] HVAC, power, floor space, and that\u2019s training plans for each one of those operators \u2026 that is a tremendous consumption of manpower at the 50th Space Wing,\u201d said Bracey.<\/p>\n

Bracey added that reducing the number of cyber surface attack areas does not guarantee complete protection, but it does reduce the number of places that require monitoring. By reining in this number, he said cybersecurity experts could devote their focus on the most probable points of attack, and be better able to locate the origin if something happens.<\/p>\n

To reach this heightened level of cybersecurity, Anttonen said SMC is taking a different approach than it has on other space programs. While SMC wants lots of involvement from industry throughout EGS, with cybersecurity, specialists are preferred.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not trying to tie cyber defense into the folks that are delivering the spacecraft. We would really rather it be tied to folks that their business is cyber defense. Using companies and using systems that are already being developed to defend the nation\u2019s networks today is what we are interested in,\u201d he said, stressing the importance of leveraging the strengths of different companies to make EGS strong, whether that strength is with satellites, designing networks, collecting data, cybersecurity, or something else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Via Satellite 09-22-2016] The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) wants to make sure its future ground system for government satellites, known as the Enterprise Ground Segment (EGS), makes cybersecurity a much bigger priority compared to the approach taken with ground systems currently in use. Today, DOD ground systems for military satellite programs all run separate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":69898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}