Saturation/Exhaustion of Spacecraft Resources

The attacker can target satellites with energy or resource constraints to lead them prioritizing power saving efforts and disabling security controls. The satellite becomes then more vulnerable to other attacks such as gaining unauthorized access or eavesdropping cleartext communications. This goal can be reached with a regenerative payload "flooding", sending to the satellite more packets than expected to rapidly consume its energy. The exploitation of a payload application can achieve a similar result. The attacker can abuse the satellite bandwidth for the retransmission of own content.

The attacker can maliciously consume satellite propellant resources to achieve the goal of reducing satellite life.

The trajectory of a Space Resource can be changed to waste its resources, to prevent the Resource from doing its purpose, to create an irrecoverable damage or to use the resource for malicious actions.

ID: T2053
Tactic: Impact
Platforms: Space Segment, Space-link communication
Version: 2.0
Created: 20 April 2023
Last Modified: 22 January 2025

Mitigations