Researchers at the National Security Agency are using artificial intelligence to characterize strange behaviors in small satellites to understand if they’ve secretly been brought under adversarial control.
“We’re looking at a way to characterize telemetry data so that as we deploy new satellites, we can make adjustments,” said Aaron Ferguson, the technical director of the encryption solutions office of NSA’s Capabilities Directorate, said at a Defense One event on Tuesday.
“Now, if you talk to a variety of analysts, and I have at NASA, they’ll say, ‘Oh, we’ve got this under control. We checked the data twice, three times,’ Ferguson said. “But we really don’t know, because there is so much data that they really don’t know if something is going wrong. They’ll say, ‘It’s just orbital debris that bumped into the satellite and knocked it off its trajectory.”
Said Ferguson, most small sats are deployed to a very specific region in low Earth orbit, so those satellites that move outside of that place or that are deployed elsewhere are exhibiting unusual, or anonymous behavior. That behavior could suggest a serious compromise but humans by themselves don’t always notice it and don’t have the capacity to reach a determination quickly, as there is often too much data. “Can we characterize small sat behaviors to be good? Bad, or I don’t know?’” said Ferguson, who emphasized that the effort was not yet a program, but an active experimentation that might one day lead to a program.
Additionally, he said his team was also looking to see “how can we deploy some type of malware to a small sat, through a ground station,” to better judge the threat to small satellites.
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