A common cyber language could become the industry’s greatest defense against increasingly sophisticated attacks.
As satellites become more interconnected with terrestrial networks and commercial systems increasingly support national security missions, the space industry faces a growing cybersecurity challenge. Attackers are no longer targeting isolated spacecraft—they’re probing entire ecosystems of satellites, ground stations, software, cloud infrastructure and communications networks.
The problem isn’t simply that threats are growing more sophisticated. It’s that the industry lacks a common way to describe them.
Organizations may identify the same adversary behavior using different terminology, making it difficult to compare incidents, identify trends or rapidly distribute defensive guidance. As the commercial space economy expands and government agencies rely more heavily on commercial providers, that fragmentation has become increasingly problematic.
That’s why organizations including Space ISAC are working to standardize how the industry understands cyber threats. By creating common frameworks that define adversary tactics, techniques and procedures, they hope to make threat intelligence more actionable today—and ultimately enable machine-to-machine sharing that could dramatically accelerate cyber defense tomorrow.
A Common Language for Space Security
Cybersecurity frameworks are often viewed as compliance tools, but Brandon Bailey, principal engineer for the cybersecurity and advanced platforms subdivision (CAPS) at The Aerospace Corporation, argues they’re fundamentally about communication.
“One of the big problems that solves is a common vernacular and taxonomy to speak to these issues,” Bailey said. “It’s a collection of expertise across various corporations, FFRDCs and academia put into one location so that people can, instead of everyone having to go off and do their own research and figure out what threats apply to a space system, just go to one place.”
That centralized knowledge base is embodied in SPARTA—the Space Attack Research and Tactic Analysis framework—which catalogs the attack vectors applicable to space systems. Unlike enterprise cybersecurity frameworks that focus primarily on information technology, SPARTA encompasses both cyber and physical threats, including kinetic attacks, directed-energy weapons and radio-frequency interference.
For engineers designing satellites or operators protecting constellations, that means they no longer have to assemble threat intelligence from dozens of separate reports. The framework consolidates years of research into a common reference that everyone can use.
Just as importantly, Bailey said, the framework shifts cybersecurity conversations away from abstract recommendations and toward concrete threats.
“In the early days, you would go to people and say, ’You need to do XYZ for security,’ and they’d ask why,” Bailey said. “Now the ’why’ is somewhat established because these are the direct attack vectors that are applicable.”
Instead of debating whether a security control is worthwhile, organizations can trace it directly to documented adversary techniques.
Helping Commercial Space Catch Up
The rapid commercialization of space has created another challenge.
For decades, much of the nation’s expertise in protecting space systems resided within government agencies and federally funded research and development centers. Today, commercial companies are designing spacecraft, operating constellations and supporting defense missions at unprecedented scale.
Bailey believes standardized frameworks allow those companies to benefit from decades of accumulated knowledge instead of rebuilding it themselves.
“So how does the commercial industry come in as a new entrant?” he asked. “Do they have to go learn that stuff that we learned over ten years, or is there a way we can aggregate it together?”
“Instead of starting from the end zone, you’re starting from the 50-yard line,” Bailey said. “Which is a lot easier to do if you’re trying to score.”
Because SPARTA incorporates contributions from government, academia and industry, Bailey said the framework represents something much larger than one organization’s perspective.
“It’s not just a couple guys in the corner making up stuff,” he said. “It’s somewhat of a consensus viewpoint of the threats that exist because it’s been peer reviewed and stood up to scrutiny.”
Building the Foundation for Interoperability
Ivan Kirillov, lead cyber operations engineer at MITRE who works with Space ISAC’s Space Automated Threat Information Sharing (SATIS) initiative, believes the industry’s biggest challenge extends beyond simply identifying threats.
“The first one is just interoperability,” Kirillov said. “To effectively leverage cyber threat intelligence, you have to understand what the intelligence is referring to.”
Enterprise IT already benefits from mature standards that define common concepts, from files and registry keys to operating systems and malware behaviors. Those shared definitions allow organizations to exchange cyber threat intelligence with relatively little ambiguity. Space systems, however, remain far less standardized.
“We don’t have anything like that in space,” Kirillov said. “We don’t have any real standardization on concepts.”
Although frameworks like SPARTA have made significant progress documenting space-specific attack techniques, many spacecraft components, flight software elements and ground-system technologies still lack common definitions. As a result, organizations frequently describe similar threats in different ways, making collaboration far more difficult than it needs to be.
For Space ISAC, that challenge extends beyond information sharing between analysts. The long-term objective is to enable security systems themselves to exchange and interpret cyber intelligence automatically—a future that depends on standardization.
From Information Sharing to Machine-to-Machine Defense
For years, cyber threat intelligence has been a human-driven process. Kirillov believes the next evolution is machine-to-machine (M2M) sharing, where security systems automatically exchange structured, actionable intelligence without requiring analysts to manually interpret every report.
“The machine-to-machine angle is basically about speed,” Kirillov said. “It used to be just people sharing spreadsheets around. It was very rudimentary and required analysts in the loop.”
The goal isn’t simply automation for automation’s sake. It’s delivering intelligence that security platforms can immediately understand and act upon.
“Machine-to-machine is really about removing the human in the loop,” he said. “It’s really about ingesting actionable information.”
That vision, however, depends on a common language.
“If you don’t have any standards—if you don’t have any ways of trying to define the data you’re talking about—then it’ll be very difficult for you to automate that,” Kirillov said.
Without standardized frameworks, every organization describes its systems differently. A threat report may reference flight software, a payload processor or a ground station component using terminology that another operator doesn’t recognize. Humans can often interpret those differences. Machines cannot.
Kirillov envisions a future where cyber intelligence flows directly into security platforms, automatically maps to an organization’s environment and immediately appears in analysts’ dashboards without manual processing.
“The end goal is you have this cyber threat intelligence flowing back and forth. It gets automatically ingested...you don’t have to do any manual processing on it,” he said. “You can already have it pop up on your dashboard...making actionable intelligence something you can readily access.”
From Knowing the Threat to Defending Against It
Understanding how attackers operate is only one side of cyber defense.
Kirillov argues that many threat reports stop after describing what adversaries did, leaving defenders to determine for themselves how—or even whether—the attack applies to their own environment.
“You need a threat model,” he said. “You need to understand what the adversary is doing and what they can do.”
But understanding the threat alone isn’t enough.
“I think that’s where standardization is currently lacking,” Kirillov said. “Sure, you can describe the attack technique at a high level, but oftentimes you’re not sharing information with the context of how the technique was carried out.”
Whether an attack succeeds often depends on configuration settings, software versions, operating systems and hardware architectures. Those details are frequently absent from traditional threat reports, making it difficult for organizations to determine whether they’re actually vulnerable.
To address that gap, MITRE’s D3FEND project focuses on the defensive side of cybersecurity. Rather than developing another threat catalog, D3FEND maps known attack techniques to the specific digital artifacts attackers target and identifies defensive techniques that protect those assets.
“We don’t have our own threat models—we use ATT&CK and SPARTA,” Kirillov said. “We then map those to what we call digital artifacts...and define low-level countermeasures you can use to defend that specific artifact.”
Together, ATT&CK, SPARTA and D3FEND provide complementary perspectives: understanding adversary behavior, adapting those behaviors to the unique characteristics of space systems and identifying concrete defensive measures.
Frameworks That Learn Alongside the Industry
Neither Bailey nor Kirillov views these frameworks as static documents. Bailey describes SPARTA as a community effort that evolves alongside the threat landscape.
“We put out what you may qualify as an 80% solution,” he said. “Knowing that we needed to add new features, new content, new ideas, new tooling. But we were waiting on industry to drive what that looked like.”
That feedback has reshaped the framework over time.
Users initially struggled with the sheer number of documented techniques.
“The feedback we got was, ‘There’s 200 techniques in SPARTA. Which of these do I have to worry about?’” Bailey recalled.
The result was a prioritization model that helps organizations focus first on the highest-value countermeasures, followed by mappings to NIST controls, indicators of behavior and guidance for detecting attacks that have already compromised a spacecraft.
That continual refinement reflects a broader trend across cybersecurity in which frameworks are becoming operational tools rather than reference manuals.
Preparing the Industry for What’s Next
Space ISAC is already demonstrating how standardized frameworks can improve information sharing across the industry.
Rather than publishing threat reports in free-form language, organizations can associate incidents with standardized SPARTA identifiers, allowing operators to track attack techniques over time and immediately access recommended mitigations.
“If the ISAC just reported ’jamming,’ people would have to go figure out the mechanisms,” Bailey said. “But if people are knowledgeable of SPARTA, they can go directly to that technique and see the list of requirements and countermeasures without having to do a bunch of other research.”
That capability may prove increasingly important as commercial constellations, defense systems and critical infrastructure become more tightly interconnected. A common cyber language won’t eliminate attacks, but it can reduce the time required to understand, prioritize and respond to them.
