Safety and Security Standards of Space Systems, ground Segments and Satellite data assets, via prevention, detection, response and mitigation of physical and cyber threats

Project Information

7SHIELD

Grant agreement ID: 883284

DOI

10.3030/883284

Project closed

EC signature date 21 April 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 28 February 2023

Funded under

• Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens

Total cost

€ 8 682 437,50

EU contribution

€ 6 969 568,75

Coordinated by

ENGINEERING - INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA SPA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 7SHIELD (Safety and Security Standards of Space Systems, ground Segments and Satellite data assets, via prevention, detection, response and mitigation of physical and cyber threats)

Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2023-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Satellite communications play a vital role in the global telecom systems as we live in a world where an ever-increasing stream of digital data is flowing between continents. In the new security landscape of Europe, Ground Segments increasingly appear as potential “new targets” for “new threats”, especially the cyber-physical ones. A cyber-physical attack to the Ground Segment installations or communication networks, respectively, would cause debilitating impact on public safety and security of European citizens and affect also other European critical infrastructure. 7SHIELD addresses the security and resilience of EU Ground Segments of Space Systems, meeting the crosscutting and the sectoral criteria of the EU Directive on Critical Infrastructures (Council Directive 2008/114/EC).
Moreover, 7SHIELD aims at providing a holistic framework enable to confront complex threats by covering all the macro stages of crisis management, namely pre-crisis, crisis and post-crises phases. In this view, 7SHIELD deploys TRL-7 solutions to improve Ground Segments’ protection in order to enhance preparedness, detection, response and mitigation of cyber and physical threats.
7SHIELD will provide and tailor innovative, accepted and efficient tools covering (1) prevention technologies to assess physical and cyber risks as well as cascading effects (2) detection technologies to seamlessly and accurately identify potential physical or/and cyber threats to Ground Segments and Satellite data assets (3) response technologies to monitor the evolvement of a physical or/and cyber-attacks, to strengthen the responsiveness and social awareness (4) mitigation technologies to consolidate the appropriate actions to mitigate the consequences of physical or/and cyber-attacks, focusing on the services continuity. The 7SHIELD will be evaluated and tested within operational environments owned by FMI (Finland), NOA (Greece), DEIMOS (Spain), SERCO (Italy), and SPACEAPPS (Belgium) to probe its performance to cope with real hazardous situations in Critical Infrastructures and to exhibit the wide applicability of 7SHIELD over different scenarios.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work done in the covered period was devoted to the collection of functional and non-functional requirements for each Pilot Use Case (PUC). Moreover, the security requirements, the General Security by Design Principles to be adopted for the needs of the 7SHIELD were identified. Regarding the 7SHIELD pre-crisis and prevention technologies, the risk assessment methodology was defined. The analysis of the user requirements for Threat Intelligence (TI) was performed and the logical architecture of the prototype and the interfaces of the services were defined. The design of 7SHIELD mission UAV was defined and the 1st prototype developed. Activities concerning the development of Face Detection and Recognition (FDR) module were completed.
The specification of system requirements for the Cyber-attack Detection framework was improved. The development of thermal and Near Infrared (NIR) sensor interface and networking as well as the elaboration of techniques for detection of man-made attacks from thermal and IR data were carried out.
Regarding the Post-Crisis management for response and mitigation of physical and cyber threats of 7SHIELD, the connectivity process of the 7SHIELD Knowledge Base through the Apache Kafka was finalized. The design of the Crisis Classification scenario for annotation tool was finalised.
Regarding the System Integration the initial work was aimed at defining how to integrate all the components developed. The 7SHIELD design and specification was extensively discussed up to the definition of the 7SHIELD Architecture.
The 7SHIELD User Interface (UI) was designed and implemented according to the user requirements, objectives of the project and the type of the information to be presented. Finalization of the validation scenarios and evaluation methodology for the operational test and of the validation and demonstration phase with a detailed plan to prepare and execute the pilots.
The communication and dissemination activities during the reporting period were successfully conducted. In the context of WP8, the communication and dissemination plan’s activities were implemented. Based on the competitiveness landscape analysis and market analysis, a detailed business plan was established. The Support of The Horizon Result Booster was requested to help partners identify the most promising Key Exploitable Results.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

7SHIELD adopts a holistic approach about threat prevention, detection, response and mitigation by protecting EU Ground Segments (GS) against cyber and physical threats, integrating cutting-edge technologies from multidisciplinary fields.
Regarding the preparedness phase, 7SHIELD provides tools to assess the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of each asset of the GS, identifying the threat agents or attack strategies could compromise them, performing a C/P risk assessment. Moreover, it provides a robust identity management tool for multi-factor authentication, data integrity and confidentiality to access GS core functions; a methodology to model the overall infrastructure to be protected, in terms of hierarchical asset decomposition and messages exchanged between them, including the dependencies between the components; and a tool to identify C/P threats and vulnerabilities through a ML based approach.
Regarding the detection phase, a custom UAV model with more features compared to those available on the market is provided. For extracting higher concepts of information from visual context, several algorithms leverage deep learning and shallow representation technologies to tackle face detection and recognition, object detection (including humans) and tracking as well as human activity recognition and abnormal event detection in surveillance objectives.
Regarding the response and mitigation phases, a classification module capable to multilevel data and information fusion from heterogeneous sources providing an integrated and generalised framework for formulating decision options for crisis level estimation is developed. 7SHIELD goes beyond the state of the art by providing a highly specified analysis of the use of social and other communications media from GS stakeholders. Moreover, better results with higher probability of neutralisation of drones will be reached by improving the Flying Hunter algorithm.
7SHIELD brings to the CI operators solutions fitting their needs. Integrating the societal and economic aspects into the research, design, development, and implementation of the proposed solutions, 7SHIELD maximises the returns from EC’s investment in science and technology. 7SHIELD addresses and provides solutions for security investment planning and optimization thanks to an impact assessment model to estimate the economic impact of the implementation to support the exploitation of the outcomes. By detecting possible threats and avoid possible damages in CIs might directly affect the economy of the European countries, 7SHIELD provides an additional layer of protection of European economy and reducing dangers to societal stability. Finally, the consortium closely followed the required legal and ethical requirements compliance especially with those related to the data acquisition and use of AI (e.g. availability of open source and online data, privacy, copyright, terms of service, video surveillance and wearable technologies).

NOA pilot

SPACEAPPS pilot

SERCO pilot

FMI pilot

DEIMOS pilot