Inhibit Ground System Functionality - DE-0002.01

Threat actors may utilize access to the ground system to inhibit its ability to accurately process, render, or interpret spacecraft telemetry, effectively leaving ground controllers unaware of the spacecraft’s true state or activity. This may involve traditional denial-based techniques, such as disabling telemetry software, corrupting processing pipelines, or crashing display interfaces. In addition, more subtle deception-based techniques may be used to falsify telemetry data within the ground system , such as modifying command counters, acknowledgments, housekeeping data, or sensor outputs , to provide the appearance of nominal operation. These actions can suppress alerts, mask unauthorized activity, or prevent both automated and manual mitigations from being initiated based on misleading ground-side information. Because telemetry is the primary method by which ground controllers monitor the health, behavior, and safety of the spacecraft, any disruption or falsification of this data directly undermines situational awareness and operational control.

Architectural limitations in ground station software can also enable deception without requiring direct compromise of the ground system. In publish-subscribe spacecraft architectures, ground tools typically attribute telemetry solely by Message ID rather than by producing application. This design assumes that Message IDs reliably identify the originating component. When a malicious onboard application publishes telemetry under a legitimate subsystem's Message ID, ground logs permanently record the spoofed data as genuine with no indication of the true source. Similarly, internal spacecraft bus commands may not be downlinked or logged by ground systems, rendering suppression events forensically invisible. This attribution gap allows onboard component impersonation to succeed without any ground system compromise: the ground infrastructure functions as designed, yet cannot distinguish authentic telemetry from architecturally valid spoofing.