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Satellite-Based Communications Security: A Survey of Threats, Solutions, and Research Challenges
Pietro Tedeschi, Savio Sciancalepore, Roberto Di Pietro
TL;DR
Current satellite systems often lack integrated security, motivating a survey of link-layer security issues, threats, and mitigation techniques. The survey identifies research challenges and lessons learned across SATCOM security approaches.
Problem
Many current satellite systems either do not integrate security at all or provide insufficient protection as satellite adoption expands.
Method
The paper surveys and classifies link-layer security solutions and examines their associated security issues, threats, and mitigation techniques.
Results
The analyzed approaches include receiver updates, while no satellite hardware updates are identified and proposals aim to minimize diverse impacts.
Takeaways & Limitations
The survey’s exposed research challenges indicate that SATCOM security remains an active area requiring further investigation.
Takeaways & Limitations
Future directions include scenarios where a quantum-based communication channel is disrupted.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Satellite-based Communication systems are gaining renewed momentum in Industry and Academia, thanks to innovative services introduced by leading tech companies and the promising impact they can deliver towards the global connectivity objective tackled by early 6G initiatives. On the one hand, the emergence of new manufacturing processes and radio technologies promises to reduce service costs while guaranteeing outstanding communication latency, available bandwidth, flexibility, and coverage range. On the other hand, cybersecurity techniques and solutions applied in SATCOM links should be updated to reflect the substantial advancements in attacker capabilities characterizing the last two decades. However, business urgency and opportunities are leading operators towards challenging system trade-offs, resulting in an increased attack surface and a general relaxation of the available security services. In this paper, we tackle the cited problems and present a comprehensive survey on the link-layer security threats, solutions, and challenges faced when deploying and operating SATCOM systems.Specifically, we classify the literature on security for SATCOM systems into two main branches, i.e., physical-layer security and cryptography schemes.Then, we further identify specific research domains for each of the identified branches, focusing on dedicated security issues, including, e.g., physical-layer confidentiality, anti-jamming schemes, anti-spoofing strategies, and quantum-based key distribution schemes. For each of the above domains, we highlight the most essential techniques, peculiarities, advantages, disadvantages, lessons learned, and future directions.Finally, we also identify emerging research topics whose additional investigation by Academia and Industry could further attract researchers and investors, ultimately unleashing the full potential behind ubiquitous satellite communications.
1. Introduction
SATCOM adoption is expanding, but exposed links and outdated or absent security create a broad threat surface. This survey addresses the gap by comprehensively classifying link-layer threats, solutions, and research challenges.
- Motivation: SATCOM adoption supports connectivity across remote locations, IoT, and emerging 6G networks.The systems are also associated with applications spanning telecommunications, navigation, maritime, and military operations.
- Security gap: Satellite links widen the threat surface because attackers can eavesdrop, tamper with, disrupt, and reroute traffic at scale.The military satellite backbone is exposed to the same or greater issues.
- Security gap: Many current satellite systems lack security or rely on outdated techniques unable to address complex contemporary attacks.The paper argues that SATCOM security solutions must be revisited and adapted to satellite-specific features.
- Research gap: Existing surveys address selected topics, but the literature lacks a comprehensive link-layer survey covering SATCOM threats and countermeasures.Prior work includes GNSS spoofing and jamming, physical-layer secrecy, quantum computing, application-specific threats, and secure routing, which this paper distinguishes from its scope.
- Contribution: The paper classifies SATCOM link-layer security literature into physical-layer approaches and cryptography techniques.It examines security services, threat models, assumptions, requirements, operational strategies, and comparative characteristics.
- Contribution: The survey identifies research domains, compares proposals, and highlights future directions and emerging research topics.Figure 1 provides a graphical overview of the classification.
2. Background
The background introduces SATCOM constellations, frequencies, architectures, and communication segments. It emphasizes that attacks can target any segment, requiring protection for ground infrastructure and satellite-originated communications.
- Overview: SATCOM background covers satellite constellations, architectures, protocols, and the main technologies used later in the paper.The section is intended to provide foundational SATCOM concepts and features.
- Satellite Constellations: Greater satellite altitude generally provides larger coverage, while the number of satellites required decreases as distance from Earth increases.The paper gives approximately 1.05 million km² coverage for one specified LEO example and about one-third of Earth’s surface for GEO.
- Frequencies and Applications: SATCOM frequency bands are regulated by the FCC and ITU, with ESA-reported bands standardized between approximately 1 and 40 GHz.Uplink and downlink channels use different frequencies to mitigate interference.
- Communication Architecture: SATCOM architectures comprise space, ground, and user segments connected through ground–satellite, satellite–satellite, satellite–ground, and user links.The ground segment includes gateways and network control infrastructure, while the user segment includes terminals such as ships, aircraft, and satellite phones.
- Security Perspective: Security attacks can originate in any SATCOM segment, so ground infrastructure and satellite-originated communications require protection regardless of destination.The paper defers detailed threat descriptions to later sections.
3. Physical Layer Security Schemes for SATCOM
The survey classifies SATCOM physical-layer security research across confidentiality, anti-spoofing, and anti-jamming, then compares approaches, assumptions, metrics, and research directions. Information-theoretic schemes provide confidentiality without traditional cryptographic material, while reviewed anti-jamming and anti-spoofing methods impose distinct receiver or operational requirements.
- Scope: The physical-layer security review covers information-theoretic confidentiality, GNSS anti-spoofing, anti-jamming, lessons learned, and future directions.These topics are organized as the main subsections of the physical-layer security discussion.
- Motivation: Legacy satellite deployments often lack security protection, and updating them can require high costs.Earlier operators viewed channel attacks as difficult and security as a slowdown factor rather than an enabler.
- Information-Theoretic Security: Information-theoretic schemes use channel randomness and noise to limit information available to unauthorized receivers without cryptographic materials or related computations.They typically target a channel-quality gap in which the authorized receiver exceeds an SNR bound while other locations remain below it.
- Information-Theoretic Security: The review evaluates physical-layer confidentiality using secrecy capacity, secrecy rate, average secrecy rate, and secrecy outage probability.Secrecy outage probability measures the probability that instantaneous secrecy capacity falls below a target secrecy-rate threshold.
- Coverage and Assumptions: Most analyzed information-theoretic studies address Satellite-to-Ground links, whereas only four consider Ground-to-Satellite links and other links are not considered.This distribution identifies a coverage gap in the surveyed link types.
- Lessons Learned: The survey identifies receiver updates as a major anti-jamming consequence, while the analyzed approaches avoid modifying satellite hardware or the transmitting chain.Some reviewed techniques require hardware or software receiver modifications, whereas the approaches summarized as requiring no satellite hardware update do not alter transmitted signals or the transmitting chain.
- Future Directions: Future directions include satellite-to-satellite physical-layer security, directional adversarial antennas, and intelligent reflecting surfaces for SATCOM.Semi-directional antennas can reduce interference from other radio activities and improve an adversary’s expected performance, motivating further investigation.
4. Cryptography Techniques for SATCOM
The surveyed SATCOM cryptography literature addresses authentication, key establishment, key distribution, and quantum-based schemes, while exposing deployment and evaluation constraints specific to satellite links.
- Scope: SATCOM cryptography studies adapt established primitives and architectures to secure satellite links, focusing on authentication and confidentiality.The literature includes both implementation adaptations and assessments of novel paradigms such as quantum computing.
- Authentication: ECC reduces key sizes, generation time, signature-operation cost, and CPU or memory overhead relative to RSA at equivalent security levels.RSA remains simple to implement and widely deployed, while public-key infrastructure introduces costly certificate-management requirements.
- Authentication: Symmetric schemes such as TESLA provide fast encryption, decryption, and digest processing when public-key infrastructure is undesirable or unaffordable.They require communicating parties to share a secret, and replacing compromised keys can be time-consuming for orbiting entities.
- Authentication: Authentication research covers peer and message authentication, with some schemes additionally providing anonymity and user privacy.Approaches include ECC, pre-shared keys, and TESLA for resource-limited broadcast environments.
- Evaluation: Formal analyses verify cryptographic schemes against specified properties, but do not necessarily establish security after integration into the reference system architecture.Most analyzed works use simulation-based evaluation, whereas only a few use real data and deployed proof-of-concept systems.
- Key agreement and quantum distribution: Key-establishment mechanisms in SATCOM have received reduced attention, and many solutions require software updates delivered over radio or through offline satellite intervention.Quantum key distribution can detect eavesdroppers, but an eavesdropper disrupts the quantum channel and prevents continued communication, leaving availability unresolved.
5. Emerging Research Challenges
Emerging SATCOM security challenges span cognitive radio, drone-to-satellite links, AI, software-defined satellites, network slicing, and operational standardization. The survey highlights promising applications but also emphasizes unresolved applicability, security, robustness, and availability requirements.
- Cognitive satellite-terrestrial networks: Cognitive-radio techniques could secure satellite-terrestrial networks, but their applicability is uncertain because satellites provide extremely wide coverage.Existing studies consider GEO, MEO, or LEO satellites communicating confidentially with fixed-satellite operators in the presence of eavesdropping secondary users.
- Drone-to-satellite: Secure drone-to-satellite communication is a critical challenge, with proposed approaches using UAVs as cooperative nodes that transmit artificial noise against eavesdroppers.Potential applications include remote drone control, video streaming, satellite information collection, and optical remote sensing.
- AI in SATCOM: AI techniques can fingerprint raw IQ samples from LEO satellites and authenticate the emitting transceiver despite large distances.Other proposed uses include identifying signal characteristics, distinguishing authentic from injected signals, and intrusion detection.
- Software-defined satellites: Software-defined networking could improve SATCOM coverage and broadband performance by allowing operators to reconfigure satellites, but it introduces specialized security issues.The survey therefore identifies additional research as necessary for SDN-based SATCOM deployments.
- Network slicing: Network slicing can provide independent logical partitions with slice-specific security policies, yet SATCOM lacks common strategies and protocols for designing such slices.Initial studies exist, but substantial work remains for Internet-of-Space-Things applications.
- Operational and sustainability challenges: Reducing satellite cost and environmental impact can affect the security services provided, while opportunistic navigation from satellite signals still requires robustness research for reliability and spoofing detection.The survey also points to growing standardization and operational-security activity for non-terrestrial and commercial space networks.
6. Conclusion
The survey organizes SATCOM link-layer security literature into physical-layer security and cryptography, covering threats, mitigation techniques, lessons learned, and future research challenges. It concludes that SATCOM cybersecurity remains an active area requiring continued research and Industry–Academia collaboration.
- The survey divides SATCOM security literature into physical-layer security and cryptography, then identifies dedicated topics within each area.
- Physical-layer coverage compares information-theoretic security schemes, anti-jamming strategies, and related threat-mitigation solutions.
- Cryptography coverage addresses authentication, key agreement, and key distribution based on the emerging quantum computing paradigm.
- The survey extracts lessons learned and future directions for the identified SATCOM security threats and research areas.
- Emerging challenges identify unresolved research problems and areas where new scientific contributions might have major impact.
- The exposed challenges indicate that designing and testing cybersecurity strategies for SATCOMs remains an active research area requiring Industry–Academia collaboration.