SmartSat recently took part in a critical exercise aimed at assessing how deeply Australia depends on space technologies and what might happen if those services are disrupted.
The Trusted Information Sharing Network (TISN) is an Australian government initiative bringing together government and industry experts to ensure the security of our nation’s critical infrastructure. This includes water, transport telecommunications banking, finance, energy services and more.
Organised by the Department of Home Affairs and supported by cybersecurity company Retrospect Labs, the exercise focused on the potential impacts of losing access to vital space-based services, particularly Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) systems. These services are primarily delivered by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the US Space Force’s GPS and the European Union’s Galileo network.
The exercise proposed a scenario in which there is an outage affecting the availability and accuracy of PNT services. While the cause and the expected duration of the simulated outage was not made known, initial information indicated a space weather event could be responsible. As the exercise developed, issues with a regional ground station presented as a potential cause.
Throughout the exercise, the facilitators introduced additional updates that proposed a potential cyber-attack, which may have been persistent and compromising data integrity for an extended period. At this stage, the scenario allowed the examination of how the critical infrastructure sector might identify, respond to and recover from availability and integrity degradation from space systems.
These evolving conditions allowed participants to explore how the critical infrastructure sector might identify, respond to, and recover from disruptions to space-based services—whether caused by natural phenomena or malicious attacks.
It was revealed throughout the exercise that some sectors were less dependent on the GNSS timing since moving to internet-based Network Timing Protocol systems for synchronisation. However, SmartSat representatives were able to highlight that this might introduce other dependencies on telecommunication networks that may also rely on space-based services.
This exercise was well resourced, with around 85 participants from a range of industries, including several technology focused organisations such as SmartSat. Around 40 participants attended the exercise in-person, including representatives from the Australian Space Agency, Geoscience Australia, CSIRO and various government agencies.
The results of the exercise will be used by the Department of Home Affairs to support ongoing risk analysis and the identification of space-linked critical assets that may fall under the 2018 Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) Act.