INDIA'S SPACE CYBERSECURITY

It is high time to integrate India's innovative perspectives, technical intelligence, and engineering abilities to secure its space journey, 

- SUDHANSU NAYAK

Cybersecurity has audaciously engrafted itself into the traditional war theatres of land, air, sea, and more recently, space. A breach of this war penta-theatre, L-AS-S-Cy challenges territorial India's integrity, strategic autonomy, and sustained growth. Any infiltration, incursion, or incapacitation of space systems can temporarily paralyse or permanently cripple and cause irreversible damage to increasingly space-dependent food, water, communications, dams, defence, energy, financial, healthcare, nuclear, transportation, and other critical networks.

The unhindered proliferation of technologies, techniques, and tactics have improved access to attack methods of common spacecraft bus architectures, to successfully bypass air-gapped systems, to mature remote proximity operations and on-orbit docking attacks, to slither into software/hardware of supply chains, or to escalate space systems' privileges.

While Russia, the United States, China, Iran, North Korea, and Israel keep their military space cybersecurity capabilities flexed, Japan, France, South Korea, and the United Kingdom are steadily picking up pace. Interestingly, the Strategic Support Force of China's People's Liberation Army has centralised space, cyber, electronic, and psychological warfare capabilities.

Besides surreptitious state actors, possible space cyberattack adversaries include terrorist organisations, subversives, political criminals, curious computer hackers, commercial competitors, dishonest insiders, disgruntled staff, trusted but careless business partners, or rogue astronauts. All of the above can launch asymmetric attacks and are immune to the natural dynamics of 'credible deterrence' and the fragile notion of stability from the condition of 'Mutually Assured Destruction'.