Digantara, an Indian SSA startup, announced its next round of funding to develop its SSA platform and new small 6U and 12U cubesats to further diversify its data sources for its Space Mission Assurance Platform.
There are many different cybersecurity concerns associated with this business model affecting different aspects of the space segment, link segment, and ground segment. When considering the CIA triad, Digantara will be primarily concerned with Confidentiality of its data to protect it from competitors and Availability to ensure the data is downlinked to a ground segment in a timely fashion. Similarly, Digantara’s proposed networked satellite operations will degrade if any node in the network drops from a fault or cyber-attack.
On the link and ground segment, a nascent and small business typically is reliant on shared ground assets to get access to mission data. This inherently poses cyber risks (denial of service, social engineering, or APTs) if adversaries such as nation state actors want access to Digantara’s proprietary data stream.
Digantara is only one of many commercial space-based SSA startups investors are supporting. Another US-based startup, Vyoma intends to apply similar principles for tracking previous undetectable objects from ground apertures. This will be a domain ripe for cybersecurity concerns in the coming years.
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