“An adversary does not care how we've divided organizational responsibility. And they don't stop at the edge of a contract or subsystem or boundary. They look for a path through the entire system. … They don't care that B and C subsystems are ready. They care that they can get from A to Z without you noticing or stopping them.”
CyberWire Daily · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026
Context
Asked for a cybersecurity example of risk that only shows up when space systems are integrated, Vito Askins frames it as asking what one compromised credential or ground interface enables across the whole mission.
Transcript
…as you can be. And still, there can be problems that come on later just because of the way the industry works. It's a massive, complex industry, and there's a lot of moving parts. And sometimes all those parts can move and just not necessarily move towards the right direction until you force it to.
…parallels there that we can think about. There's a certain problem that just only appears once we bake things up to a certain level. And I'm sure you've seen things like that many, many times. And I'm wondering if you can walk me through maybe an example or some sort of paradigm that we can follow.
Sure. Now, I naturally will approach cybersecurity primarily from the system engineering and mission readiness state. I'm not trying to replace the cyber specialist. What my question would be on this is how does cyber risk interact with the rest of the mission architecture? And cyber makes the problem especially visible because an adversary does not care how we've divided organizational responsibility. And they don't stop at the edge of a contract or subsystem or boundary. They look for a path through the entire system. And I think system engineering really has to do kind of the same thing. And I'll give an example of that. So if you would imagine a satellite mission where the spacecraft and the ground software, the network providers, the identity management systems and all the operation environments, they all satisfy their allocated requirements. Individually, each organization may have good evidence, but now…
We'll take a quick break now. Be right back.
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