CyberCUBE Mission – The European Space Agency’s (ESA) CyberCUBE mission, designed to strengthen the protection of space assets against growing cyber threats, has been successfully launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission, led by the multinational technology company GMV through its teams in Romania and Spain, also involves Alén Space, a pioneering New Space company that has been part of GMV since 2023.
The successful launch of the satellite into orbit marks the start of a pioneering mission designed to validate cutting-edge cybersecurity technologies and capabilities applied to the space environment under real-world conditions. CyberCUBE is part of the Cyber Evolutions activities of ESA’s Cybersecurity Operations Center (CSOC) within the framework of the Cyber Security Resilienceprogramme, a cross-cutting initiative led by the Agency’s Security Office to strengthen the protection of both its corporate systems and its space missions.
CyberCUBE was designed as an in-orbit experimentation platform capable of providing ESA with a secure, flexible, and reconfigurable environment for demonstrating new cybersecurity technologies before they are incorporated into future European missions. The mission’s main goal is to validate the CSOC’s data monitoring and analysis capabilities using actual space assets. At the same time, it will make it possible to test new onboard cyber capabilities and collect critical information to improve the resilience of space systems against emerging threats.
Highlights of the planned experiments include detection and protection against unauthorised access to command-and-control systems, identification and mitigation of jamming and spoofing attacks, monitoring of onboard systems, and the validation of new cybersecurity algorithms – such as post quantum cryptography (PQC)- applications, and technologies. The platform will also make it possible to carry out practical exercises and advanced experiments inspired by real-world cyberdefence environments. To support this objective, ESA issued an open call for experiment proposals, inviting researchers, engineers, and innovators to test new technologies, methods, algorithms, protocols, and techniques in the field of cybersecurity applied to space systems using CyberCUBE.
For more information visit: www.gmv.com.
