WannaFly: An Approach to Satellite Ransomware

Ransomware is a prevailing concern across sectors, wreaking havoc on operations and causing cascading failures often cyber-physical in nature. The space sector has experienced ransomware attacks; however, the space vehicle has not been the target of these publicly disclosed incidents. A ransomware attack against a space vehicle would need to be carefully crafted to mitigate the risk of destroying the underlying functionality of the spacecraft, while still achieving its purpose-denying access until a ransom is paid. Through static code analysis, this paper proposes an approach for deploying a ransom attack against a space vehicle that engages NASA’s core Flight System (cFS).