CSUM: A Novel Mechanism for Updating CubeSat while Preserving Authenticity and Integrity

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: CSUM: A Novel Mechanism for Updating CubeSat while Preserving Authenticity and Integrity
المؤلفون: Gangwal, Ankit, Paliwal, Aashish
سنة النشر: 2024
المجموعة: Computer Science
مصطلحات موضوعية: Computer Science - Cryptography and Security
الوصف: The recent rise of CubeSat has revolutionized global space explorations, as it offers cost-effective solutions for low-orbit space applications (including climate monitoring, weather measurements, communications, and earth observation). A salient feature of CubeSat is that applications currently on-boarded can either be updated or entirely replaced by new applications via software updates, which allows reusing in-orbit hardware, reduces space debris, and saves cost as well as time. Securing software updates employing traditional methods (e.g., encryption) remains impractical mainly due to the low-resource capabilities of CubeSat. Therefore, the security of software updates for CubeSats remains a critical issue. In this paper, we propose CubeSat Update Mechanism (CSUM), a lightweight scheme to provide integrity, authentication, and data freshness guarantees for software update broadcasts to CubeSats using a hash chain. We empirically evaluate our proof of concept implementation to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. CSUM can validate 50,000 consecutive updates successfully in less than a second. We also perform a comparative analysis of different cryptographic primitives. Our empirical evaluations show that the hash-based approach is at least 61$\times$ faster than the conventional mechanisms, even in resource-constrained environments. Finally, we discuss the limitations, challenges, and potential future research directions for CubeSat software update procedures.
Comment: This is an extended version of our paper accepted at IEEE LCN 2024
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00784
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.2407.00784
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv