BigBear.ai: Identifying Space System Vulnerabilities with AI and Digital Twins

BigBear.ai's Mission and Expertise

• 🎯 BigBear.ai provides decision support to customers in the military, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence community.
• 🧠 Their expertise spans software engineering, cybersecurity, and AI deployments, with a focus on national security and critical infrastructure.

Space Crest: Cyber Resilience for Space Systems

• 🚀 Space Crest is BigBear.ai's solution for creating more resilient space systems, integrating cybersecurity, space technology, and AI.
• 💡 It originated from a hypothesis to create a cyber range for space systems using high-fidelity physics models.
• 🛠️ Space Crest is enabled by Redwire Space's Acorn 2.0 digital engineering platform, which builds digital twins of satellites.

Digital Twins and Simulation Capabilities

• 🛰️ The Acorn platform allows for the creation of digital twins from models, simulators, emulators, or real hardware components of satellites.
• ⚡ These digital twins enable high-fidelity simulations where components interact as they would on a real satellite.
• 📈 Accelerated simulation modes allow for the generation of millions of scenarios, accumulating up to 10,000 years of data in a short period.
• ⚠️ This capability allows for testing cyber attacks that may not have occurred in real-world, unclassified environments.

Vulnerability Research and Remediation

• 🔍 Space Crest utilizes a red teaming platform with tools like Kali Linux and Metasploit to simulate cyber attacks on satellite systems.
• ✅ The goal is to uncover vulnerabilities, test remediation strategies, and ultimately increase spacecraft resilience.
• 🔗 Integration of hardware-in-the-loop and software-in-the-loop allows for testing with actual space components, such as a star tracker, demonstrating denial-of-service attack resilience.
• 📦 This approach can help address supply chain weaknesses by evaluating individual components for vulnerabilities.

Current Market Needs and Success Stories

• 🌐 The space market is increasingly requiring digital engineering and digital twins, with many government contracts mandating their use.
• 🤝 Projects like the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) highlight the need for integrating diverse vendor systems through digital engineering.
• 🔬 A successful project involved training machine learning models to detect and classify cyber attacks on a modeled satellite, demonstrating the effectiveness of AI in identifying threats.