SECURE ON-BOARD AND ACCESS CONTROL ROUTER FOR FUTURE SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS (ARTES 4.0 SPL 4S 5A.097) - EXPRO+

Objective: The objective of the activity is to develop an on-board router with secure tagging, access control and filtering capabilities suitable to route traffic from users with different securitypriorities (e.g. commercial, governmental, etc.) to support future LEO, MEO and multi-orbit satellite communications systems.TargetedImprovements: Enabling novel capability, not existing today inESA MS, which will allow to route securely user traffic with different security constraints in large satellite communicationsconstellations.Description: Due to the increasingly shared nature of satellite communication systems, specifically at the level of the payload and inter-satellite links, there is a need for traffic filtering androuting capabilities based on different security requirements.This activity will extend the capabilities of regenerative payloads, by considering the authenticated source of the traffic and related security priorities, in order to include fine-grainedfiltering and dynamic routing. The onboard router shall be able to decide how to route packets, depending on the authenticated source (based on the validated tag), securityrequirements, destination ,type of traffic data, etc. The onboard secure routing module shall interface with a key management system managing keys used to validate theauthenticity of traffic for different entities. Algorithms specific for onboard policy-based filtering will be developed, considering various criteria for filtering and routing. In addition tofiltering based on authenticated tags, source, but also destination, packet protocol and header information, the algorithms will need to consider the varying latency anddynamic/scalable network topologies. The policy-based routing configuration will have to be dynamically reconfigurable, and shall consider, in addition to the onboard processingand memory constraints, the available inter satellite links or the available ground stations for routing decision-making. Under increased load, the router may furthermore be able torestrict the allocation of onboard resources to ensure the prioritised/efficient processing of critical traffic data. Segregated zones for management/operational purposes, as well asfor traffic with different security requirements shall be considered.The activity will design a secure on-board router enabling the filtering and routing based on the authenticated source of the traffic, integrated with a key management system. Theactivity will then implement the selected design as a payload module and perform verification and validation of the module by testing the overall resilience of the module.