NSF-SNSF: A Resilient and Efficient Cyber-security Fabric and Evaluation Framework for Future Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks (SATUQ)

The emerging satellite networks will play a vital role in next-generation networked systems and applications (e.g., 6G, the Internet of Things), and ensuring the reliability and security of these satellite-enabled systems and services is vital. Although generic security protocols exist, the unique characteristics of satellite systems, like delay-awareness, error-proneness, and the intricate software/network stack of space-aerial-terrestrial integrated networks (SATIN), require efficient and lightweight network security protocols.

The security threats due to emerging quantum computers and the heavy overhead of existing post-quantum secure standards compound these challenges. In this project, the research team aims to fill these gaps by developing a fast and lightweight network security fabric that respects the needs of trustworthy next-generation SATIN for the post-quantum era.

The team will innovate on multiple fronts, including algorithmic (quantum-safety, distributed computing, time-disclosed cryptography), architectural (decentralized SATIN, distributed key management), and evaluation aspects of SATIN. The project's broader significance lies in novel solutions that achieve delay awareness, post-quantum security, and energy efficiency for SATINs, which enhance national security and broadly offer new educational and publicly adaptable tools with international collaborations.

The research team will create efficient network security solutions that increase the resiliency of next-generation SATIN to a vast range of threats, such as active adversaries, system breaches, and network faults while offering post-quantum security. The first thrust will enable delay-aware and secure broadcast functionalities by innovating post-quantum cryptography standards via new offline-online transformations, distributed execution strategies, and algorithmic improvements.

The second thrust will exploit the architectural capabilities of the terrestrial segment to mitigate the quantum-safe commitment generation and distribution burden while enabling resilient key management. The third thrust will create novel and publicly verifiable symmetric-key solutions via synergizing time-disclosed cryptography and distributed computation methods.

The final thrust will be to develop a comprehensive performance evaluation framework with simulations and tests (e.g., over NSF FABRIC) for our proposed network security assets that encapsulate several satellite-enabled applications and software-defined network architectures. The research team will execute outreach and broadening participation activities, including interdisciplinary curriculum development, international collaborations with workshops and joint educational activities, summer camps for minority K-12 students, industrial partnerships for transition to practice, and open-source platforms for reproducibility and broad adaptation.

This collaborative U.S.-Swiss project is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), where NSF funds the U.S. investigator and SNSF funds the partners in Switzerland.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.