Today satellite operators of institutional, commercial, and even sometimes governmental missions are still communicating with their spacecraft “in clear”, i.e. without implementing any security on the communication links. Unprotected communications for telemetry and telecommand (TMTC) data as well as payload data are making spacecrafts vulnerable to eavesdropping sensitive data all the way to an attacker taking control of the spacecraft.

As a step forward in securing space assets and data, several agencies have added to the CCSDS standards a security extension called the “Space Data Link Security” (SDLS) protocol. SDLS is a protocol to secure communications whose security is applied at the frame level of one or multiple virtual channels, equivalent to a L2 VPN (point-to-point).

To grow the adoption of SDLS-based security on space comms, CYSEC developed ARCA SATLINK, a software product providing end-to-end protection of TMTC and payload data.