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Is It Possible to Hack Into a Spacesuit?
NASA declined to answer, but security experts weigh in
Along with nuclear missile silos and the U.S. stock market, few other targets provide such a tantalizing challenge for U.S. foes as hacking our space endeavors.
In fact, in June of this year, NASA published an audit document from the U.S. Office of the Inspector General revealing that the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had been hacked in 2018. Hackers accessed an unauthorized Raspberry Pi computer connected to the JPL servers that they used to probe deeper into NASA’s network.
Officials from the Johnson Space Center (JSC) were worried that the attackers could move laterally from the gateway into the communications systems, potentially disrupting the signals used on human space flight missions.
As of March of this year, the JSC had not restored the use of all its communications data because of continuing concerns about its reliability.
Hacking a NASA astronaut’s spacesuit in flight
To be sure, the audit makes clear that NASA has some terrestrial security concerns to deal with. But what about hacking human spaceflight systems in orbit?
Could a hacker gain remote access to, say, a spacesuit or Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) while an astronaut is performing a spacewalk? Such a notion seems more likely in the realm of James Bond fiction. And yet, cybersecurity vulnerabilities continue to blindside us nearly every day in the United States.
NASA politely declined to comment for this story, but several cybersecurity experts did, and their insights are revealing.
Could a hacker gain remote access to, say, a spacesuit or Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) while an astronaut is performing a spacewalk?
Aaron Cornelius at Grimm, a forward-thinking cybersecurity firm, said, “It is possible to do Extravehicular Activity (EVA) “tethered,’’ which means that power and oxygen are supplied by the space station through an umbilical cable rather than by the suit itself. In that case, it may be possible to manipulate the…
