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Resilience Through Escalation: A Graph-Based PACE Architecture for Satellite Threat Response

Anouar Boumeftah, Sarah McKenzie-Picot, Peter Klimas, Gunes Karabulut Kurt

Abstract

Modern satellite systems face increasing operational risks from jamming, cyberattacks, and electromagnetic disruptions in contested space environments. Traditional redundancy strategies often fall short against such dynamic and multi-vector threats. This paper introduces a resilience by design framework grounded in the PACE (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency) methodology, originally developed for tactical communications in military operations, and adapts it to satellite systems through a layered state transition model informed by threat scoring frameworks such as CVSS, DREAD, and NASA's risk matrix. We define a dynamic resilience index to quantify system adaptability and implement three PACE variants (static, adaptive, and epsilon-greedy reward optimized) to evaluate resilience under diverse disruption scenarios. Results show that lightweight, decision aware fallback mechanisms can substantially improve survivability and operational continuity for next generation space assets.

Resilience Through Escalation: A Graph-Based PACE Architecture for Satellite Threat Response

Abstract

Modern satellite systems face increasing operational risks from jamming, cyberattacks, and electromagnetic disruptions in contested space environments. Traditional redundancy strategies often fall short against such dynamic and multi-vector threats. This paper introduces a resilience by design framework grounded in the PACE (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency) methodology, originally developed for tactical communications in military operations, and adapts it to satellite systems through a layered state transition model informed by threat scoring frameworks such as CVSS, DREAD, and NASA's risk matrix. We define a dynamic resilience index to quantify system adaptability and implement three PACE variants (static, adaptive, and epsilon-greedy reward optimized) to evaluate resilience under diverse disruption scenarios. Results show that lightweight, decision aware fallback mechanisms can substantially improve survivability and operational continuity for next generation space assets.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 33 sections, 8 equations, 6 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Related Work
  3. Existing Threat Modeling Frameworks
  4. Origins of the PACE Methodology
  5. Research Gap and Contributions
  6. System and Threat Overview
  7. Threat Taxonomy Across Space Segments
  8. Space Segment
  9. Ground Segment
  10. Link Segment
  11. System-Level Modeling and Impact Taxonomy
  12. Signal Jamming and Spoofing
  13. Cyberattacks
  14. Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP)
  15. Cascading Failure Effects Across Subsystems
  16. ...and 18 more sections

Figures (6)

  • Figure 1: System-level block diagram of a representative satellite architecture. Each large block denotes a major subsystem. Colored diamond markers indicate primary vulnerability by attack vector: jamming (orange), cyber (green), and EMP (blue).
  • Figure 2: PACE graph-based representation diagram.
  • Figure 3: Average final utility (left), total cumulative cost (center), and DREI (right) across all trials for the static, adaptive, and $\epsilon$-greedy PACE models.
  • Figure 4: Final operational state distributions showing the proportion of runs ending in nominal, degraded, or failure states across models.
  • Figure 5: Temporal evolution of utility and cost. The red dashed line marks the crisis event at timestep 2.
  • ...and 1 more figures