Detection of an unusually high number of processed commands recorded in spacecraft logs, which may indicate a flooding attack using valid commands. Such a surge can overwhelm spacecraft processing capabilities, leading to resource exhaustion like CPU spikes, memory depletion, and increased battery usage. Monitoring log entries can reveal if the spacecraft is being flooded with valid but excessive commands, which could create denial of service conditions by saturating system processing resources.
ID | Name | Description | |
EX-0001 | Replay | Replay attacks involve threat actors recording previously data streams and then resending them at a later time. This attack can be used to fingerprint systems, gain elevated privileges, or even cause a denial of service. | |
EX-0010 | Malicious Code | Threat actors may rely on other tactics and techniques in order to execute malicious code on the victim spacecraft. This can be done via compromising the supply chain or development environment in some capacity or taking advantage of known commands. However, once malicious code has been uploaded to the victim spacecraft, the threat actor can then trigger the code to run via a specific command or wait for a legitimate user to trigger it accidently. The code itself can do a number of different things to the hosted payload, subsystems, or underlying OS. | |
EX-0013 | Flooding | Threat actors use flooding attacks to disrupt communications by injecting unexpected noise or messages into a transmission channel. There are several types of attacks that are consistent with this method of exploitation, and they can produce various outcomes. Although, the most prominent of the impacts are denial of service or data corruption. Several elements of the space vehicle may be targeted by jamming and flooding attacks, and depending on the time of the attack, it can have devastating results to the availability of the system. | |
EX-0013.01 | Valid Commands | Threat actors may utilize valid commanding as a mechanism for flooding as the processing of these valid commands could expend valuable resources like processing power and battery usage. Flooding the spacecraft bus, sub-systems or link layer with valid commands can create temporary denial of service conditions for the space vehicle while the spacecraft is consumed with processing these valid commands. |