The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has revealed details of the latest space cybersecurity research to help protect critical infrastructure. Through the Aerospace SPARTA framework, S&T has published key resources, including Indicators of Behavior, published in April 2025, and Prioritized Countermeasures, published in March 2026. These resources are meant to enable onboard threat detection and provide actionable information for implementing space cybersecurity.
These efforts are seen as major milestones helping secure the space-based capabilities that the U.S’s national critical infrastructure and DHS missions increasingly rely on. DHS revealed details of this research, June 10.
SPARTA is a publicly available space-cyber knowledge base of real and lab-tested cyber threats. It’s sourced by the IEEE P3536 Committee, the working group developing standards for space systems cybersecurity design.
“Onboard threat detection is critical for space cyber resilience. These industry resources are an important first step in lowering barriers and enabling space systems to be resilient against current and emerging cyber threats,” Ernest Wong, S&T technical lead, said in a statement.
The DHS S&T directorate works to develop resources for industry to facilitate future cyber resilient space systems. An open-source reference implementation of threat detectors will be released later this year.
