Big Data and Security: a new challenge for space?

Julio Vivero, Head of the Consultancy and Infrastructure Section of GMV Secure e-Solutions in Barcelona, has taken part in the 3rd ESA International Security Symposium with a paper describing the concept of Space WARP, stressing Big Data’s potential role in the first European Space WARP.

As Vivero explained in his lecture, “the WARP concept is a way of providing an environment of confidence in which community members can share information on information-security to improve their intelligence and protection capabilities”. This concept, coined in the UK, “is perfectly applicable to space information”.

In the opinion of the Head of Consultancy, although in recent years “awareness of cybersecurity has grown especially in the space sector and few organizations nowadays lack specialist information-security resources”, the exchange of information security within the space community “is still scarce and far from generating the potential benefits this community could be enjoying”.

Among the factors that, in Vivero’s opinion, are balking the exchange of this information within the space community, special mention must be made of two: one is “the confidentiality of the information handled, since security information is by nature sensitive and there is therefore a big reluctance to share it with other organizations”. The second one is “the profit obtained from the exchange of information”.

Among the solutions he put forward in his presentation for overcoming these obstacles, he mentioned “Automatic information-security exchange tools, standard protocols, anonymity solutions, not sharing any visibility policy and, above all, Big Data”. This is so because the tools capable of extracting information from huge volumes of data “will allow each organization to obtain the maximum benefit from the shared information and adapt the acquired knowledge to its specificities”. The key point for successful Big Data implementation “does not depend on technology but rather mastery of specific knowledge, knowledge that is capable of deciding what to look for and how”.

The event, held in Frascati (Rome) on 13 and 14 February brought together all the public and private stakeholders of the space sector. The Symposium focused on how challenges related to security of Big Data impact the activities and security of international and national organizations.

Presentation of Julio Vivero (42:30)