Mission Secure: NASA Fortifies Space Frontier with Best Practices Guide

The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has released the inaugural edition of a guide on best practices for cybersecurity in space, as announced in a press release on the agency’s website. Its objective is to fortify the cybersecurity efforts of both government and private space missions.

This guide marks a significant milestone in NASA’s commitment to ensuring the longevity and resilience of its space missions, serving as a resource to enhance their security and reliability.

Intended to benefit not just NASA but also its international partners, the aerospace industry, and other organizations involved in space exploration, the guide‘s recommendations are suitable for securing space missions, programs, and projects of any scale.

“At NASA, we recognize the importance of protecting our space missions from potential threats and vulnerabilities” said Misty Finical, deputy principal advisor for Enterprise Protection at NASA. “This guide represents a collective effort to establish a set of principles that will enable us to identify and mitigate risks and ensure continued success of our missions, both in Earth’s orbit and beyond.”

The agency’s website states that modern space systems are becoming increasingly integrated and interconnected, presenting new opportunities for operation, communication, and data collection in space. However, this also increases the risk of vulnerabilities in the systems. NASA‘s guide is aimed at providing best practices to adapt to these new challenges and implement effective security measures.

The agency plans to gather feedback from the aerospace community to integrate into future versions of the document.