A Zero-Trust Satellite Services Marketplace Enabling Space Infrastructure as a Service

Abstract

Exponential growth of the space industry avails unprecedented opportunities to establish a marketplace of satellite infrastructure services. However, security and resource constraints pose critical challenges to implementing the exchange of services such as storage, compute or even arm-based manipulation. We propose a fully distributed architecture that will facilitate resilient, trustless interactions to enable space infrastructure as a service and applications such as in-space servicing. The distributed architecture engages Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) such as blockchains and directed acyclic graphs to designate and enforce security policy via smart contracts between multiple parties across payloads owned or operated by different service providers on the same satellite bus or across a constellation. This work presents a zero-trust space infrastructure as a service architecture and examines how the architecture addresses critical challenges such as consensus and cyber resilience to facilitate a space services marketplace.