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This is an overview of our 17 June 2024 report on outer space cybersecurity. Published under a Creative Commons license, this overview was republished widely worldwide, such as by SF Chronicle, Ars Technica, Discover, Fast Company, Raw Story, GovExec, The Space Review, many others. 

This is an overview of our ICARUS matrix that's designed to generate novel scenarios in space cybersecurity, as first presented in our 17 June 2024 report on outer space cyberattacks. 

This article is an overview of our NSF-funded project on the same subject. Published under a Creative Commons license, this overview was republished widely worldwide, such as by Smithsonian Magazine, Discover, Fast Company, Salon, SF Chronicle, SF Gate, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Food Manufacturing, TechXplore, Atlantico (France), Japan Today, and many others 

Recently at Cal Poly, we released a 95-page report on outer space cyberattacks, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. As the first of its kind, it explains not only what is driving this growing problem, but also how to anticipate novel scenarios to avoid being taken by surprise. This article presents the 10 top findings from that report. 

Though general awareness around it may be low, space cyberattacks are an increasingly urgent problem given the vital role that space systems play in the modern world. Open-source or public discussions about it typically revolve around only a couple generic scenarios, namely satellite hacking and signals jamming or spoofing. But there are so many more possibilities. The report offers a scenario-prompt generator—a taxonomy of sorts, called the ICARUS matrix—that can create more than 4 million unique scenario-prompts. We will offer a starting set of 42 scenarios, briefly describing each one, to begin priming the imagination-pump so that many more researchers can bring their diverse expertise and perspectives to bear on the problem. A failure to imagine novel scenarios is a major risk in being taken by surprise and severely harmed by threat actors who are constantly devising new ways, inventive and resourceful ways, to breach the digital systems that control our wired world. To stay vigilant, defenders likewise need to be imaginative to keep up in this adversarial dance between hunter and prey in cybersecurity. More than offering novel scenarios, we will also explore the drivers of the space cybersecurity problem, which include at least seven factors we have identified. For instance, the shared threat of space debris would seem to push rational states and actors to avoid kinetic conflicts in orbit, which weighs in favor of cyberoperations as the dominant form of space conflicts. Outer space is the next frontier for cybersecurity. To guard against space cyberattacks, we need to understand and anticipate them, and imagination is at the very heart of both cybersecurity and frontiers.