Dr. Matthew Bradbury

Matthew Bradbury is a Senior Lecturer conducting research into security, context privacy and trust assessment in resource-constrained and distributed systems.

NewSpace, New Threats – Exploring the Influence of New Entrants to the Space Industry on Cybersecurity

Sara Cannizzaro, Matthew Bradbury, Sam Maesschalck, Gregory Epiphaniou, and Carsten Maple. NewSpace, New Threats – Exploring the Influence of New Entrants to the Space Industry on Cybersecurity. In IEEE Aerospace Conference. Big Sky, Montana, USA, 1–8 March 2025. IEEE.

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The space sector is seeing rapid growth amongst commercial organisations, giving rise to NewSpace. Established organisations involved in the space sector or typically governmental or private sector organisations for which there has been a need to secure the system’s deployed. However, new small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) entering the sector encounter challenges ensuring the security of their system. In this paper we undertook 8 semi-structured interviews to explore perspectives on space cyber security.

Perspectives

Impact of new entrants on the cyber security of NewSpace covering: 1) technology and infrastructure, 2) cyber security maturity and 3) regulations, guidelines and standards.
Summary of the key findings concerning the expected influence of new entrants to the space sector and showing the cybersecurity challenges of NewSpace.

In these interviews we found that new entrants to the space sector encountered a number of challenges with securing space systems. This included:

  • Cyber security training and skills specific to space-based systems
  • The cost of implementing security versus a client’s willingness to pay for it
  • The impact of how long such equipment will be deployed for and the challenges this poses
  • Concerns about the hardware component supply chain
  • The reality of limited vulnerability information sharing

Overall, similar themes were identified compared to terrestrial critical national infrastructure (CNI). However, there are a number of space specific concerns not found in terrestrial CNI, such as the large number of SME entrants and the regulatory landscape.