As the satellite industry pushes to strengthen its ties with government customers, hosted payloads continue to arise as a good win-win business model for private-public partnerships – but there are challenges aplenty. At the “Protecting the Payload: Increased Use Calls for Increased Security” panel at the Hosted Payload Summit 2013 in Washington, D.C., industry experts discussed their views on what steps the industry can take to provide information assurance (IA), resiliency and security to make their offering more attractive to government customers.

While members of the United States government were unable to attend the event due to the federal government shutdown taking place in the country, the panel was robust with the participation of Jim Armor, Maj. Gen. (Ret.), vice president, strategy and business development, space systems division, ATK Aerospace Group; James Chambers, vice president of engineering, Xtar; Chuck Cynamon, vice president, U.S. government business development, Space Systems Loral (SSL); and Tim Frei, vice president, communication systems, space systems division, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. Moderating was Patricia Cooper, president of the Satellite Industry Association (SIA), filling in for Doug Loverro, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, U.S. Department of Defense.

Frei opened the discussion talking about the trust model in place for hosted payloads on U.S. government satellites. “It’s implicit, it’s known, it’s built on many, many decades of experience in fielding higher-realm, high-performance, trusted national DoD operational space systems,” he said. “We’re embarking in a new realm where we try to figure out what that trust model is through the entirety of the payload life cycle – from the requirement phase, the development phase, the production, delivery, launch activation and in through operations. We have to get that trust model right for each of the applications or we’ll trip on security.”

Cynamon added that this trust model needs to include the end users, “the guys who ultimately are going to receive information aren’t totally bought in yet,” he said.

“If you look out from an architectural perspective, there’s a number of analyses of alternatives that are occurring in DoD. Virtually all the mission systems, both within the national systems as well as in the DoD are nearing the end of their production cycles. That means that virtually all of them are reconsidering what’s next,” Cynamon said. “The good news is they’re all looking at where do hosted payloads fit, the bad news is none of them have yet completed an architecture that says ‘here is where hosted payloads fit.’”

To get to this point, Cynamon said the industry needs to recognize that the commercial model doesn’t necessarily encompass the level of information assurance that government customers require. “It’s all about information, whether there’s a comm payload or a weather payload a missile-warning payload, it comes down to information … it needs to be encrypted, it needs to be protected and so we have to find some way to efficiently do that,” he said.

Disaggregated architectures were a pivotal topic during the discussion. While they seem to be a model under consideration, the challenge is to make it robust. “Remember, the DoD is not only looking for affordability, they’re looking for resiliency as well, and each individual cylinder of excellence ground system becomes a vulnerability for that particular mission or that particular hosted payload,” Cynamon added.

For Chambers, the concept of “resiliency through disaggregation” is an opportunity for the hosted payload model to help reduce security threats for government customers. “When you disaggregate through a number of hosted payloads, then that makes that threat less possible because there’s always a different path that you can take if you jam one satellite, you have another satellite that you can use,” he said.

Additionally, disaggregation could provide faster, more affordable opportunities for technology refresh. “For instance, if you start off with a system and it’s only one satellite and somebody figures out a way to disrupt that satellite, then with this concept of desegregation, maybe further down the line, you can do a counter measure to that first payload that was launched. So you kind of build in security features as you go and as new threats arise and as technology evolves,” Chambers said. “I think that’s one way that this concept can help with hosted payloads.”

However, he also remarked that one of the issues with the disaggregation model is the level of complexity it introduces, not only in space, but also on the ground.

Cynamon is confident the existing commercial models are a good start to tackle this complexity. “Would that work for DoD? No, I’m not saying necessarily that it will, but … there are models out there for how to combine dedicated satellites, hosted functions or hosted payloads, and that end-to-end view of a system to have that situational awareness,” he said.

But the weight is not just in the industry to come up with solutions, trust models and architectures. Chambers highlighted the importance of collaboration and cooperation between government and industry. “The user data is best encrypted, as an example, at the end, where the source is, and that’s not at the satellite. So we have to work in partnership with governments to make security happen,” he said.

Cynamon used an example from his experience working with Hughes Network Systems (HNS) dealing with a high-level customer such as the company that runs the Power Ball lottery. “There’s over a 100,000 nodes on that network and if you think that they haven’t figured out security when you’ve got a $600,000,000 Power Ball jackpot on the line [you’re wrong],” he said. “Penalties equal to the potential lost revenue at any given time so that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially in the last hour or so before a jackpot of that size.”

Using this example he highlighted how the commercial industry is capable of rising up to the challenge and providing the security government customers require though partnership and collaboration.

“If they [the government] specify their security needs in the same kind of way that customers, smart buyers, think about what they need in information … if they specify the security in terms of the importance of the information and how that information needs to be delivered and protected, I think it will give more confidence to the users that we generally never see in meetings like this. … It’s the guys that have to use the information that’s coming off of this that ultimately have to have the trust in it,” Cynamon said.

The panel concluded highlighting the importance of educating those end users in the fields that hosted payloads can provide the security and information assurance they required. The panelists were optimistic that, with cooperation, government customers could highly benefit from hosted payloads for secure missions.