CSUM: A Novel Mechanism for Updating CubeSat while Preserving Authenticity and Integrity
<|reference_start|>CSUM: A Novel Mechanism for Updating CubeSat while Preserving Authenticity and Integrity: The recent rise of CubeSat has revolutionized global space explorations, as it offers cost-effective solutions for low-orbit space applications (including climate monitoring, weather measurements, communications, and earth observation). A salient feature of CubeSat is that applications currently on-boarded can either be updated or entirely replaced by new applications via software updates, which allows reusing in-orbit hardware, reduces space debris, and saves cost as well as time. Securing software updates employing traditional methods (e.g., encryption) remains impractical mainly due to the low-resource capabilities of CubeSat. Therefore, the security of software updates for CubeSats remains a critical issue.   In this paper, we propose CubeSat Update Mechanism (CSUM), a lightweight scheme to provide integrity, authentication, and data freshness guarantees for software update broadcasts to CubeSats using a hash chain. We empirically evaluate our proof of concept implementation to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. CSUM can validate 50,000 consecutive updates successfully in less than a second. We also perform a comparative analysis of different cryptographic primitives. Our empirical evaluations show that the hash-based approach is at least 61$\times$ faster than the conventional mechanisms, even in resource-constrained environments. Finally, we discuss the limitations, challenges, and potential future research directions for CubeSat software update procedures.<|reference_end|>
@article{gangwal2024csum:,
    title={CSUM: A Novel Mechanism for Updating CubeSat while Preserving
  Authenticity and Integrity},
    author={Ankit Gangwal, Aashish Paliwal},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.00784},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.00784},
    primaryClass={cs.CR}
}