Secure and Privacy-Preserving Technologies for Satellite Communications
A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 July 2025 | Viewed by 87
Special Issue Editors
Interests: security and privacy; satellite network security; space IoT security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The recent boom in LEO satellite constellations promotes the seamless coverage of communication networks on a global-scale and enables real-time remote sensing and enhanced global navigation satellite systems. Due to the long propagation distance and orbital characteristics of LEO satellites, communication links with them suffer from being easy to access by passive and active attackers. A large number of Earth-based access points including ground stations and portable devices offer attackers an enormous range of hacking points, which complicates the process of tracing and preventing cyberattacks. Communication satellite constellations also enable the connection and command of low-altitude aircrafts, which introduces new end users and application use cases to this domain. Satellite-based remote sensing can be applied in a plethora of fields, from society, economy, and scientific research to conflict and war, to obtain data which impossible to gather through ground investigations. On one hand, the recent emergence of on-orbit processing techniques, introduces new vulnerable sectors involving onboard data retrival, processing, and storage devices. On the other hand, due to the heavy investments into launching and maintaining remote sensing satellites, the intellectual property of remote sensing images needs to be protected. Thus, secure on-orbit data processing and querying techniques need to be designed, and access control or image concealment techniques need to be implemented for the images resulting from remote sensing. Attackers constantly find new ways to exploit the features of global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs), which mainly covers three attack types: blocking, jamming, and spoofing.
Based on the above descriptions, this Special Issue aims to cover all the security and privacy threats facing innovative satellite systems and end users.
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Authentication in transmission links;
- Secure satellite routing protocols;
- Secure computing in on-orbit processing;
- Threat intelligence enabled by satellite constellations;
- Vulnerablities of satellite equipment;
- Signal attacks in navigation services;
- Privacy of remote sensing images;
- Access control in remote sensing;
- Security in remote sensing data recovery;
- Security in satellite-assisted low-altitude aircraft;
- Secure AI-based detection algorithms in remote sensing.
Dr. Qinglei Kong
Dr. Songnian Zhang
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- satellite constellation
- remote sensing
- satellite navigation
- security and privacy
- on-orbit processing
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