By Ajay Bagaria, Business Analyst & Proposal Manager, RBC Signals
Electronic warfare (EW) attacks on ground stations are a growing threat to government and commercial satellite communications. In these attacks, adversaries use electromagnetic energy to disrupt or deny friendly access to radio frequency (RF) communications. The two most common forms of electronic warfare – jamming and spoofing – are deployed to disrupt SATCOM and impede operations by interfering with the transmission of RF signals between satellites and ground stations. Historically, satellites were often prime targets for electronic attacks because they were few in number, usually larger in size, and deployed sparingly in uncongested orbits. Modern small satellites and proliferated constellations have shattered that paradigm for adversaries and subsequently made ground stations more attractive targets.
Jamming and spoofing each present unique challenges that cannot be addressed with a one-size-fits-all approach. When jamming a ground station, adversaries will generate and transmit overwhelming radio interference in the same frequency band as the receiving station’s antenna, making the satellite’s signals indistinguishable from the noise. In spoofing attacks, adversaries transmit fake signals (disguised as friendly, legitimate ones) containing false, corrupt, harmful, or duplicate data to the receiving station. Each of these attacks requires specific countermeasures that can rapidly detect, attribute, and adapt to the interfering signals.
Electronic warfare and cyber warfare in SATCOM settings are often mistakenly considered the same. Electronic attacks primarily focus on interfering with the RF signals being transmitted, while cyberattacks compromise the actual data being transmitted (and any systems that may use this data). While these two types of warfare are distinct, they can overlap and can even complement each other. For example, an uplink spoofing attack could be used to deliver malicious code into a spacecraft (i.e. an electronic warfare-delivered cyberattack). As the lines between these attacks become increasingly blurred, ground station and satellite operators must factor electronic warfare into their cybersecurity posture.
At RBC Signals, we are constantly working with our partners, advisors, and suppliers to (1) understand current and future adversarial counterspace threats and (2) develop solutions for our customers. Centrally, we employ the multi-mission ground segment as a service model, which leverages any one ground system to support numerous missions. This provides our customers with flexible access to additional ground infrastructure, which can reduce data latency, increase data download capacity, and boost overall network resiliency in an adversarial landscape. Particularly when adversaries utilize jamming attacks against a ground station, it is critical to have backup ground stations in diverse locations around the world. Our global network of nearly 80 antennas in over 50 locations offers this added resiliency through geographic diversity. We see enormous promise in AI, ML, and deep learning-based detection algorithms as defense mechanisms against jamming and spoofing attacks. Further, next-gen dual-factor authentication solutions for space communications (such as combining optical and RF communication methods) can provide additional protections. By co-locating state-of-the-art data processing environments (e.g. AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, virtual machines) at our ground stations, RBC Signals is preparing an optimal environment for deploying these new types of countermeasures as they are readied.