Fiscal Year	2020
Division	Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department	Electrical & Computer Engineering
Investigator(s)	McEachen, II, John C. Tummala, Murali
Sponsor	Department of Defense Space (DoD)
Summary	Blockchain is a transformative approach for leveraging consensus in distributed computational systems - in this case a large number of satellites and their respective ground stations - to provide unparalleled decentralized and redundant security. As such, this research will address the strategic objective of "Autonomous Distributed Cyber-Secure Networking and Communications" by leveraging the distributed nature of the 2035+ sponsor architecture. The research addresses the technical domains of both "Discovery Research" and "Fundamental Limits." Two primary objectives will be pursued in this research: 1) development of algorithms which use a blockchain to log satellite system events and conditions as part of the health reporting of satellites; and 2) the development of a blockchain with smart contracts to use in the detection of malicious attacks on the satellite system. Incorporating blockchain into the satellite communications infrastructure in this manner allows decentralization of the security management and removal of centralized security functions such as a certificate authority (CA). Decentralization allows more complete use of inter-satellite and mesh communications. Consequently, we anticipate at least an N log N increase in communications performance (where N is the number of nodes participating in the blockchain) in decoupling security management functions while still accounting for blockchain overhead.
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Publications	Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data	Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal