Weak communication protocols. Ones that don't have strong encryption within it
| SPARTA ID | Requirement | Rationale/Additional Guidance/Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SPR-18 | The [spacecraft] shall protect the confidentiality and integrity of information during preparation for transmission, transmission, and reception, in accordance with the [organization]‑provided encryption matrix.{SV-AC-7}{AC-3,SA-8(19),SC-8,SC-8(1),SC-8(2),SC-16,SC-16(1),SC-40} | * Preparation for transmission and during reception includes the aggregation, packing, and transformation options performed prior to transmission and the undoing of those operations that occur upon receipt. |
| SPR-40 | The [spacecraft] shall only use communication protocols that support encryption within the mission.{SV-AC-7,SV-CF-1,SV-CF-2}{SA-4(9),SA-8(18),SA-8(19),SC-40(4)} | Protocols lacking encryption create unavoidable exposure. Selecting encryption-capable protocols ensures confidentiality and integrity can be enforced mission-wide. This reduces risk from protocol downgrade attacks. |
| SPR-50 | The [spacecraft] shall implement cryptographic mechanisms to protect the confidentiality and integrity of information during transmission unless otherwise protected by approved physical safeguards.{SV-AC-7}{SC-8,SC-8(1),SC-8(4),SI-7(6)} | Unprotected transmission exposes telemetry, commands, and state information to interception or manipulation. Cryptographic protections ensure authenticity and confidentiality across all communication paths. Physical safeguards alone are insufficient in contested environments. |
| SPR-51 | The [spacecraft] shall implement cryptographic mechanisms to protect message externals unless otherwise protected by alternative physical safeguards.{SV-AC-7}{SC-8(3)} | Message externals (headers, routing data, metadata, protocol identifiers) can reveal operational state, enable traffic analysis, or be manipulated to redirect or replay communications. Cryptographic protection prevents adversaries from exploiting metadata to infer spacecraft posture or inject malicious traffic. Even if payload content is encrypted, unprotected externals can enable protocol exploitation or session hijacking. Physical safeguards alone are insufficient in contested RF environments. |
| SPR-75 | The [organization] shall define acceptable secure communication protocols available for use within the mission in accordance with applicable federal laws, Executive Orders, directives, policies, regulations, and standards.{SV-AC-7}{SA-4(9)} | The secure communication protocol should include "strong" authenticated encryption characteristics. |
| SPR-76 | The [spacecraft] shall only use [organization]-defined communication protocols within the mission.{SV-AC-7}{SA-4(9)} | Restricting protocols prevents introduction of undocumented or insecure communication paths. Unapproved protocols may lack encryption, replay protection, or monitoring integration. Standardization reduces attack surface and simplifies validation. Controlled protocol selection strengthens supply chain and integration assurance. |
| SPR-148 | The [spacecraft] shall protect the confidentiality and integrity of all transmitted information.{SV-IT-2,SV-AC-7}{SC-8} | * The intent as written is for all transmitted traffic to be protected. This includes internal to internal communications and especially outside of the boundary. |
| SPR-244 | The [organization] shall define the secure communication protocols to be used within the mission in accordance with applicable federal laws, Executive Orders, directives, policies, regulations, and standards.{SV-AC-7,SV-CF-1}{PL-7,RA-5(4),SA-4(9),SA-8(18),SA-8(19),SC-8(1),SC-16(3),SC-40(4),SI-12} | Standardized secure protocols reduce interoperability risk. Alignment with federal standards ensures validated cryptography. Defined protocols prevent ad hoc insecure implementations. Governance strengthens communication assurance. |
| SPR-375 | The [organization] shall develop and document program-specific system and communications protection policies in accordance with CNSSP 12. {SV-AC-7,SV-CF-1,SV-AC-3}{SC-1} | Alignment with CNSSP 12 ensures compliance with national security requirements. Standardized communications protection strengthens cryptographic assurance. Program-specific tailoring ensures relevance. Policy integration strengthens governance. |
| SPR-388 | The [organization] shall produce, control, and distribute asymmetric cryptographic keys (where applicable) using NSA Certified or Approved key management technology and processes per CNSSP 12.{SV-AC-3,SV-AC-7}{SC-12(3)} | Using NSA-certified key management ensures cryptographic integrity and compliance with federal mandates. Proper generation, distribution, and control reduce key compromise risk. High-assurance key lifecycle management underpins command authentication and secure updates. Governance over keys preserves mission trust. |
| ID | Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| REC-0005 | Eavesdropping | Adversaries seek to capture mission communications across terrestrial networks and RF/optical links to reconstruct protocols, extract telemetry, and derive operational rhythms. Collection is most often passive, but may be semi-passive or actively elicited, where the adversary transmits probes or crafted exchanges to provoke identifiable responses from the target rather than waiting to observe them. On networks, packet captures, logs, and flow data from ground stations, mission control, and cloud backends can expose service boundaries, authentication patterns, and automation. In the RF domain, wideband recordings, spectrograms, and demodulation of TT&C and payload links, spanning VHF/UHF through S/L/X/Ka and, increasingly, optical, enable identification of modulation/coding, framing, and beacon structures. Even when links are encrypted, metadata such as carrier plans, symbol rates, polarization, and cadence can support traffic analysis, timing attacks, or selective interference. Community capture networks and open repositories amplify the reach of a modest adversary. | |
| REC-0005.01 | Uplink Intercept Eavesdropping | Uplink reconnaissance focuses on capturing the command path from ground to spacecraft to learn telecommand framing, authentication fields, timing, and anti-replay behavior. Valuable artifacts include emission designators, symbol rates, polarization sense, Doppler profiles, and any preambles or ranging tones that gate command acceptance. Even if payload and TT&C share spectrum, their authentication postures often differ, knowledge an adversary can exploit. Partial captures, console screenshots, or training recordings reduce the effort needed to build an SDR pipeline that “looks right” on the air. Where missions authenticate without encrypting the uplink, traffic analysis can reveal command cadence and maintenance windows. | |
| REC-0005.02 | Downlink Intercept | Downlink collection aims to harvest housekeeping telemetry, event logs, ephemerides, payload data, and operator annotations that reveal system state and procedures. Even when payload content is encrypted, ancillary channels (beacons, health/status, low-rate engineering downlink) can disclose mode transitions, battery and thermal margins, safing events, and next-pass predictions. Community ground networks and public dashboards may inadvertently provide stitched datasets that make trend analysis trivial. Captured framing and coding parameters also help an adversary build testbeds and refine timing for later actions. | |
| REC-0005.04 | Active Scanning (RF/Optical) | Active scanning moves beyond passive collection: an adversary transmits or injects probes intended to elicit identifiable responses that reveal frequencies, protocols, or device behavior. Examples include stimulating auto-track or auto-reply beacons, provoking ranging responses, tickling access schemes (TDMA/FDMA bursts), or sending benign-looking frames to observe AGC, saturation, or error counters. Optical/lasercom analogs include alignment pings or modulation patterns that solicit acquisition messages. The objective is RF “banner grabbing”, learning enough to build compatible demod/decoder chains or to map control surfaces, without necessarily breaching authentication. Because scans can resemble normal acquisition attempts, they may blend into the noise floor of operations. | |
| EXF-0003 | Signal Interception | The adversary captures mission traffic in transit, on ground networks or over the space link, so that payload products, housekeeping, and command/ack exchanges can be reconstructed offline. Vantage points include tapped ground LANs/WANs between MOC and stations, baseband interfaces (IF/IQ), RF/optical receptions within the antenna field of view, and crosslink monitors. Depending on protection, the haul ranges from plaintext frames to encrypted bitstreams whose headers, rates, and schedules still yield valuable context (APIDs, VCIDs, pass timing, file manifest cues). Intercepted sessions can guide later replay, cloning, or targeted downlink requests. | |
| EXF-0003.01 | Uplink Exfiltration | Here the target is command traffic from ground to space. By receiving or tapping the uplink path, the adversary collects telecommand frames, ranging/acquisition exchanges, and any file or table uploads. If confidentiality is weak or absent, opcode/argument content, dictionaries, and procedures become directly readable; even when encrypted, session structure, counters, and acceptance timing inform future command-link intrusion or replay. Captured material can reveal maintenance windows, contingency dictionaries, and authentication schemes that enable subsequent exploitation. | |
| EXF-0003.02 | Downlink Exfiltration | The attacker records spacecraft-to-ground traffic, real-time telemetry, recorder playbacks, payload products, and mirrored command sessions, to obtain mission data and health/state information. With sufficient signal quality and protocol knowledge, frames and packets are demodulated and extracted for offline use; where protection exists only on uplink or is inconsistently applied, downlink content may still be in clear. Downlinked command echoes, event logs, and file catalogs can expose internal activities and aid follow-on targeting while the primary objective remains data capture at scale. | |
| EXF-0005 | Proximity Operations | A nearby vehicle serves as the collection platform for unintended emissions and other proximate signals, effectively a mobile TEMPEST/EMSEC sensor. From close range, the adversary measures near-field RF, conducted/structure-borne emissions, optical/IR signatures, or leaked crosslink traffic correlated with on-board activity, then decodes or models those signals to recover information (keys, tables, procedure execution, payload content). Proximity also enables directional gain and repeated sampling passes, turning weak side channels into usable exfiltration without engaging the victim’s logical interfaces. | |
| ID | Name | Description | NIST Rev5 | D3FEND | ISO 27001 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CM0002 | COMSEC | Communications security (COMSEC) denies unauthorized parties access to information derived from telecommunications while ensuring the authenticity of those communications. COMSEC is commonly defined as a broad discipline that may encompass cryptographic security, transmission security, emissions security, cryptographic key management, traffic-flow security, and physical security of COMSEC material. Within SPARTA, these areas are further broken down through separate countermeasures, including CM0029 | TRANSEC, CM0030 | Crypto Key Management, CM0003 | TEMPEST/EMSEC, and CM0073 | Traffic Flow Analysis Defense. CM0002 provides the overarching communications-security context and supports the coordinated application of these specialized countermeasures. All mission links, particularly telemetry, tracking, and commanding (TT&C) links, should employ communications-security protections appropriate to the sensitivity, criticality, operational environment, and threat exposure of the information being exchanged. These protections may include cryptographic protection, transmission security, emissions security, traffic-flow protection, secure key management, and physical protection of COMSEC material, as addressed by the applicable specialized countermeasures. Spacecraft should not provide an operational mode that permits required cryptographic protection or command authentication on TT&C links to be bypassed or disabled. Operational, maintenance, test, recovery, and contingency modes should be considered when evaluating whether communications-security protections can be unintentionally or improperly circumvented. Communication receivers and associated signal-processing or TRANSEC mechanisms should detect and, when mission-defined criteria are met, reject or otherwise safely handle transmissions exhibiting anomalous signal characteristics consistent with communications deception. Cryptographic mechanisms should authenticate and integrity-check received content but should not be treated as RF-deception detectors. | AC-17 AC-17(1) AC-17(10) AC-17(2) AC-18 AC-18(1) AC-2(11) AC-3(10) CA-3 IA-4(9) IA-5 IA-5(7) IA-7 PL-8 PL-8(1) SA-8(18) SA-8(19) SA-9(6) SC-10 SC-12 SC-12(1) SC-12(2) SC-12(3) SC-12(6) SC-13 SC-16(3) SC-28(1) SC-28(3) SC-7 SC-7(10) SC-7(11) SC-7(18) SC-7(5) SC-8(1) SC-8(3) SI-10 SI-10(3) SI-10(5) SI-10(6) SI-19(4) SI-3(8) | D3-ET D3-MH D3-MAN D3-MENCR D3-NTF D3-ITF D3-OTF D3-CH D3-DTP D3-NTA D3-CAA D3-DNSTA D3-IPCTA D3-NTCD D3-RTSD D3-PHDURA D3-PMAD D3-CSPP D3-MA D3-SMRA D3-SRA | A.5.14 A.6.7 A.8.1 A.8.16 A.5.14 A.8.1 A.8.20 A.5.14 A.8.21 A.5.16 A.5.17 A.5.8 A.5.14 A.8.16 A.8.20 A.8.22 A.8.23 A.8.26 A.8.12 A.5.33 A.8.20 A.8.24 A.8.24 A.8.26 A.5.31 A.5.33 A.8.11 | |
| CM0003 | TEMPEST | TEMPEST controls (i.e., emissions security (EMSEC)) protect spacecraft system components, internal data communications, and communication buses against side-channel and proximity-based attacks that exploit unintended electromagnetic, electrical, or acoustic emanations. Critical components must be enclosed within appropriate casings or shielding structures that attenuate unintended emissions to levels that deny adversaries the ability to reconstruct processed data or infer system state from externally observable signals. Shielding must extend to internal buses and data pathways, not only to individual processing elements, as inter-component communications represent a significant and often overlooked emanations surface. The physical enclosure strategy must be integrated with the broader system architecture so that shielding effectiveness is not degraded by penetrations, connectors, or cable routing that create unintended emissions paths. During sustainment & maintenance, Spacecraft TEMPEST and EMSEC protections are primarily established during design, fabrication, and integration, but sustainment remains applicable through configuration control, review of deployment-state or hardware changes, preservation of qualification evidence, assessment of relevant anomalies, and evaluation of refurbishment, replacement, or follow-on production changes. The guidance below addresses these spacecraft considerations as well as applicable ground-segment maintenance activities. | PE-19 PE-19(1) PE-21 SC-8(3) | D3-PH D3-RFS | A.7.5 A.7.8 A.8.12 | |
| CM0036 | Session Termination | Where session-oriented communications are used between ground systems and spacecraft, between ground system components, or across internal spacecraft interfaces, the associated connection or session must be terminated upon completion or after a period of inactivity exceeding a threshold defined in the mission’s concept of operations (CONOPS). Failure to terminate idle or completed sessions leaves authenticated connections open and exploitable, providing adversaries with an opportunity to inject commands or data into an existing authenticated session without needing to complete the authentication process independently. Inactivity timeout thresholds must be established through the CONOPS process rather than set arbitrarily, balancing the security benefit of rapid session termination against the operational consequences of terminating a session that an operator or automated process may legitimately require across a contact gap or processing delay. Session termination must invalidate the associated session identifiers, authorization state, and cryptographic session state so that the terminated session cannot be reused. Where secure session resumption is operationally required, it must use a mission-approved, cryptographically protected mechanism with defined validity limits and must not permit reuse of expired, revoked, or invalidated session state. | AC-12 AC-12(2) SC-10 SI-14(3) SI-4(7) | D3-SDA | A.8.20 | |
| CM0072 | Protocol Update / Refactoring | Communication and data exchange protocols governing spacecraft, ground system, and inter-system interfaces may contain specification-level vulnerabilities that cannot be resolved through implementation hardening alone, requiring updates to or refactoring of the protocol itself to eliminate the underlying weakness. Protocol vulnerabilities may arise from design flaws in the original specification, from advances in adversarial capability that render previously adequate security assumptions insufficient, or from emerging threats such as quantum computing that threaten the cryptographic primitives upon which protocol security depends. Protocol update or refactoring encompasses the deliberate modification of the rules, formats, and procedures governing system communications to address known vulnerabilities, improve security properties, or maintain adequate protection against the evolving threat environment over the mission's operational lifetime. Because space system protocols are often tightly coupled to hardware interfaces, flight software implementations, and ground system processing pipelines, protocol changes carry significant integration risk and must be managed through rigorous engineering change processes; this complexity makes proactive protocol security assessment and planned update capability more cost-effective than reactive refactoring under operational urgency. | CM-3 CP-11 SI-2 | D3-NM D3-NVA D3-AI D3-AVE D3-SYSM D3-SYSVA D3-OAM D3-ORA D3-PMAD | 8.1 9.3.3 A.8.9 A.8.32 A.5.29 A.6.8 A.8.8 A.8.32 | |
| CM0029 | TRANSEC | Transmission security (TRANSEC) is the component of communications security (COMSEC) concerned with protecting the characteristics of the transmission itself, as distinct from protecting the content of the information being communicated. TRANSEC controls reduce the likelihood, effectiveness, or operational impact of transmission interception, signal disruption, communications deception, and exploitation of transmission characteristics within the defined threat model. Applicable TRANSEC techniques include jam-resistant waveforms that increase resistance to jamming and communications deception, spread spectrum and frequency hopping techniques that reduce signal predictability and improve resistance to interception and disruption, low probability of intercept and low probability of detection (LPI/LPD) signal designs that reduce transmission observability, and transmission scheduling or pattern discipline that limits the intelligence value of traffic analysis. TRANSEC requirements should be applied to mission communication links according to link criticality (e.g., TT&C, crosslinks), threat exposure, and operational consequence. TRANSEC must be treated as a distinct layer of protection complementary to, but not a substitute for, cryptographic protection of information content. | AC-17 AC-18 AC-18(5) CA-3 CP-8 PL-8 PL-8(1) SA-8(19) SC-16 SC-16(1) SC-40 SC-40(1) SC-40(3) SC-40(4) SC-5 SC-8(1) SC-8(3) SC-8(4) | D3-MH D3-MAN D3-MENCR D3-NTA D3-DNSTA D3-ISVA D3-NTCD D3-RTA D3-PMAD D3-FC D3-CSPP D3-ANAA D3-RPA D3-IPCTA D3-NTCD D3-NTPM D3-TAAN | A.5.14 A.6.7 A.8.1 A.5.14 A.8.1 A.8.20 A.5.14 A.8.21 A.5.29 A.7.11 A.5.8 A.5.33 | |