SANCTUARY Systems GmbH

The SANCTUARY Zero-Trust Platform (ZTP) is a security architecture developed for embedded systems that is designed and built for security and safety. The ZTP allows the independent execution of different software components on a single hardware platform preventing any interference between them. E.g. a mission-critical software, like the flight control software, can operate with real-time execution guarantees even in the presence of a malicious or compromised software component on the platform. When considering a specific spacecraft, such as ESAs OPS-SAT CubeSat, the isolation of software components is especially important for separating the space experiments developed by potentially untrusted third parties from the flight control software. With the ZTP, the space experiments can be executed as part of a satellite software framework running on Linux, such as ESA’s Nanosat MO, whereas the flight control software is executed, in parallel but isolated, on a real-time operating system that fulfills the special safety requirements of the flight control software. Together with ESA, SANCTUARY already presented an early research project on how the Zero-Trust Platform can enable secure multitenancy on spacecraft at SpaceOps 2023, underlining the interest in this topic at ESA.