Trust Without Boundaries: An Architectural Analysis of Satellite Flight Software
An analysis of security vulnerabilities in spacecraft flight software, focusing on NASA's cFS architecture and experimental findings.
As spacecraft become increasingly software-driven, onboard flight software represents a critical security boundary. This analysis of NASA's Core Flight Software (cFS) reveals how authority and communication are distributed among components, highlighting architectural weaknesses. Experiments demonstrate how a malicious component can exploit shared authority, making it hard to distinguish from legitimate actions. The findings underscore the need for stronger internal trust boundaries in future flight software systems.
This synthesis was produced from its source by AI; there is no human editor or manual review step. How we work