Europe deploys 7Shield - cybersecurity from space?
SHIELD – Safety and Security Standards of Space Systems, ground Segments and Satellite data assets, via prevention, detection, response and mitigation of physical and cyber threats.
The project gives an innovative boost to the protection of earth segments and satellite data resources. Protecting critical infrastructures from cyber threats. From IoT to machine learning, here are the advanced technologies integrated into the framework.
The overall concept of 7SHIELD is to provide to the European Ground Segment facilities a holistic framework enable to confront complex cyber and physical threats by covering all the macrostages of crisis management, namely pre-crisis, crisis and post-crises phases.
The Copernicus era has created a new market with the massive amounts of satellite data that the ground segments of space systems receive serve to the market and governmental bodies.
A physical/cyber-attack to their installations or communication networks, respectively, would cause debilitating impact on public safety and security of EU citizens and public authorities. A physical attack on a space ground segment makes the distribution of satellite data problematic and, on the other hand, a cyber-attack in its data storage, access and exchange affects not only the reliability of space data, but also their FAIR standards: findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability. Current approaches do not fully exploit the recent advances in surveillance mechanisms with robotic technologies and AI.
Given the above, the Center for Security Studies (KEMEA), has successfully submitted as member of a wider consortium, 7SHIELD proposal under the topic “SU-INFRA01-2019: Prevention, detection, response and mitigation of combined physical and cyber threats to critical infrastructure in Europe” of H2020. 7SHIELD has officially started on September 2020 and will have a duration of 24 months, coordinated by ENGINEERING (Italy).
7SHIELD will be an integrated yet flexible and adaptable framework enabling the deployment of innovative services for cyber-physical protection of ground segments, such as e-fences, passive radars and laser technologies, multimedia AI technologies, that enhance their protection capabilities, while integrating or interoperating with existing protection solutions already deployed at their installations. The framework will integrate advanced technologies for data integration, processing, and analytics, machine learning and recommendation systems, data visualization and dashboards, data security and cyber threat protection. The technological solution is co-designed with first responders’ teams and contributes to policy making, standardisation and new guidelines for contingency planning and service continuity. The project will be evaluated and demonstrated in five installations of ground segments of space systems.
KEMEA will be a task leader both in identifying security requirements in relation to the technology systems in use and the integration of the 7SHIELD solution and in defining the model of the Emergency Response Plan, by following the guidelines as described in international Standards such as ISO22320:2018 Security and resilience -- Emergency management -- Guidelines for incident management. KEMEA will also have a crucial role in pilot implementation, evaluation and training and an overall contribution to the whole development of the program.