August 2024 - neuco

The Past, Present and Future of the SATELLITE Conference

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Katja Schmieding

On a special episode of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, Jeffrey Hill, the Executive Chairman of the SATELLITE conference from Access Intelligence, joined us to discuss the latest event in March. He shared his insights from fifteen years of working for the conference, as well as his insights on the future of the space industry and its resulting impact on the conference.

How did the satellite industry look when you first started working at the SATELLITE conference in 2009?

Back then it was small enough that everybody knew each other. It was a very intimate industry where everybody worked for everybody at one point in time. It was around 10,000 attendees at the time, so it was still big, but most of them were from the broadcast industry because we had just as many satellite operators as launchers because they would sell to the operators. There were very few young people and very few women. Everybody had an engineering background, so everyone used ‘engineering speak’, even if they weren’t in engineering now because they were executives or in legal or finance.

The conference used to be all about selling products and discussing the industry’s next engineering transition. Some people, like SpaceX, were trying to disrupt the industry, but the idea of somebody coming in and doing something faster than usual was met with suspicion. People thought these new ventures would fail because nothing had changed in the last ten years. Everybody was about to retire, so who was going to take over? Change needed to happen whether people were ready or not.

What solutions are currently the driving force of the conference, and how are they shaping the show?

There are a few different ones for a few different groups of people. This year, the main conversation is this convergence between the cellular terrestrial world and satellite telecommunications, with the advancement of 5G as the standard. We have become a general telecommunication show in the sense that people from the terrestrial world have to come and learn about how satellites work and how the satellite business model works. They don’t know how satellite operators make money, so we have an educational component where we’re meeting this new group of people.

The second most popular conversation is about the fact that satellites’ data analytics and imagery are now so commonly used in the news to inform people about current events. Satellite data is now a crucial element of any news story. It brings proof right to the public. You’ll hear a lot about satellite intelligence data gathering. I imagine we will also hear a lot about the recent news story about Russia possibly bringing nuclear weapons into space and violating the Space Treaty of 1967. I imagine that will be a unifying discussion because everybody in every session dealing with the space segment will have to talk about protecting their assets and infrastructure.

We’re not just talking about telecommunications on the Earth; now we’re talking about the moon and getting communications systems established there. If we were to successfully land on the moon, it would take us 15 minutes to know if they did.

How do you see both the industry and therefore the SATELLITE conference developing over the next 10 years?

I think the industry is going to be much more focused on infrastructure security as space becomes more competitive on a global economic scale. I think we’re going to see a lot more discussion about policy because the industry needs guidance. The private industry can move really fast, but without directing policy or some agreement with the major space powers about what is or is not acceptable in space, we cannot approach space real estate. We have to forget about certain boundaries and work together. There’s going to be a complete shift in policy that’s going to require private industry and government to take the lead.

I also think you’ll see a lot more discussion on the future of propulsion and rocket technology. We’ve really reached the limit of what we can do with fuel-based rockets, which are just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. To get all our stuff in space, we’re going to have to launch more rockets, but we don’t want to destroy our environment while we’re trying to get into space. We have to look at some of these alternatives.

I think we’re going to see a lot more diversity in terms of the types of people who come to the SATELLITE conference from outside of the space industry. There’s going to be a focus on education and demystifying space, making it seem more normal than it is. In reality, space is a super dangerous, inaccessible place to do anything. We’re going to have software engineers coming from other industries, and they’re going to want to know how their systems will operate on a space station. The space industry is going to have to communicate with them and explain to them why they should be doing their research in space.

To hear more from Jeffrey, tune into Episode 34 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast here.

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Exploring Software Supply Chain Security

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Tom Wilding

The software supply chain is ever-evolving. On Episode 32 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast, we were joined by Luis Rodríguez Berzosa, the Chief Technology Officer at Xygeni, to explore the topic. He’s a physicist and mathematician who brings significant experience to the field of software engineering security, focusing on static analysis and software supply chain security. Here are his thoughts.

How have you seen software supply chain security change over the last 20 years?

20 years is a long time in the IT industry, so our product security has improved a lot in that time. We’ve worked with APB security, position analysis, and static analysis – that’s the API security testing web application firewalls – which nobody uses anymore. Cloud-native protection has been another hot topic in recent years, and there are better mechanisms for patching or avoiding memory-related and other low-level security flows now. However, we are no better at securing the server product itself.

Unfortunately, in the software supply chain, fewer resources are assigned to protecting the server infrastructure at the factory where software is built and deployed. Modern infrastructures have a large exposed attack surface, so the bad guys, who are always motivated to gain the most with the least effort, shifted their campaigns from the better-protected applications to the public packages and even the internal build and deployment systems. They attack the weaker points, so when we protect one thing, the attackers will look for another place to get in. Now they they use the software supply chain as an attack amplifier.

What was your inspiration in founding the business?

In the summer of 2021, we realised that software infrastructure security was lagging behind the rest of the sector. We started defining the project by establishing what exactly the needs were, analysing the potential market and testing what ideas could work. Then in December 2021 came the Log4J vulnerability, which created a shockwave in the entire software industry. That was the push we needed to start to decide to go on. In fact, we had been looking at cloud-native security during 2020 and 2021, but we were out of our element there because we are more traditional guys. With server security, we were at home. So we started with the project and went to market last year. We are now active in marketing and selling the platform.

What are the traditional methods of securing the software supply chain, and why aren’t they enough in today’s environment?

In the past, organisations would compile software artefacts, package them, and then digitally sign them with a code signing certificate for integrity protection. They then deployed them on an update site and were done. Now, attackers can penetrate a build system, inject malware in your software dependencies and embed malicious behaviour in your source code. They have changed their tactics and techniques. All the old methods do not work anymore because the attackers inject malicious code that will pass onto your customers. The problem is that the traditionally simple ways of protecting integrity by cold signing don’t work anymore.

One of the challenges within software supply chain security is keeping DevOps running while not whilst not falling under the supply chain attack. How does Xygeni solve this challenge?

You have to take a look at many different things. You have to automate those checks, compiling inventory and context because you have to know what is going where. You also need an alignment with industry standards because there are so many initiatives, ideas and best practices out there in supply chains. You have to get the best of them and put them on the ground to convert the generic principles into real actionable things.

We have to try to take all the great ideas that are arising and figure out how they could be used in the real world. We put the emphasis on topics that we feel offered the best cost-benefit trade-off, such as detecting unusual activity or misconfigurations in real time. Our business is mainly international organisations who want to create software, but they feel they don’t need to secure the infrastructure. That means that features like semi-automated guidance will resolve a problem for them. They are looking for things like automation workflows and so on, so we try to provide them in our platform. Our focus is on helping users cope with a huge number of issues and the complexity of modern software.

To hear more from Luis, tune into Episode 32 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here.

Including Everybody in the Space Industry

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Andrew Ball

The space industry is connected to so much of life on Earth. On a special episode of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, I was joined by Jakub Dziwisz, the CEO at Orbify, to discuss how we can include the wider community in conversations about the future of space. Read on for the highlights of the conversation.

“We’re at an interesting stage of adoption at the moment, which is part of the natural way that any sort of new technology has always been adopted. I still remember cars in the ‘80s; when they would break up in the middle of the road. Every driver would know a little bit about how to fix the car because they were difficult to operate. You would need that knowledge if you were stuck in the middle of the road in the ‘80s. Nowadays you can call someone to come and fix everything for you without getting your hands dirty. The same thing happened with computers in the late ‘90s.

When this technology became useful, it became so easy that even small children could use it. We are observing the same trend with Earth observation now. Twenty years ago, Landsat imagery was accessible only to the very few people with PhDs. Now, we are always increasing the quality of the images and making them more accessible to normal people. As the technology evolves and matures, it will be able to reach larger amounts of the population.

That’s good because in the majority of societies, citizens have all the influence because every couple of years they vote for the government and decide what type of politics they would like to see. We as consumers have a lot of impact on the goods that we purchase too. When I go to a store, more often than not, I’m trying to understand what impact my chosen products are creating on the planet. If someone tells me “We are green, we produce our goods without killing or harming animals,” then I’m more likely to choose their product instead of the other one. The same thing happens If someone says, “We are using less plastics to produce our bottles,” and things like that.

This is why I think that we as citizens have all the tools to impact politics and the commercial world and see the change. In order to do this, we need more transparency. I’m not a big fan of regulations, I prefer some dose of freedom, but one of the regulations that the EU is introducing is super helpful, which is called the Anti-Greenwashing Directive. Greenwashing is ending because if you claim to have zero impact or be an environmentally conscious company, you have to prove it.

Our observational remote sensing service is a great way to collect proof of our corporate impact. We need more information—not necessarily more data, because we already have over 1,000 satellites orbiting the Earth collecting terabytes of data every minute—but we do need numbers that describe the environment around us. And this is exactly what we are trying to bring to the table.

To hear more from Jakub, tune into Episode 33 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast here.

Recent Changes to Sports Streaming Services

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Sara El Mahjouby

As the sports streaming industry increasingly moves from traditional broadcasting to digital streaming, there are a number of challenges that organisations across the media industry are juggling. On Episode 29 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we spoke to Fabio Gallo, the General Manager of Europe and Asia at ViewLift, about his insights into the topic. Here’s what he said:

What is the impact of this shift from traditional broadcasting to streaming within the sports industry?

There is a huge transformation right now in the market. The biggest transformation is from traditional distribution, which was mainly business-to-business, to a more business-to-consumer or even direct-to-consumer model. What’s helping lots of our players there, like entertainment broadcasters and sports organisations, to transport content digitally around video streaming platforms.

I think the big challenge for broadcasters is to not only focus on video quality or the technologies around the streaming platform. There are many things that have to be taken into consideration, from marketing to pricing or business strategies. There needs to be an understanding of the average revenue per user, how you can improve your quality of services, and how you can get better at understanding consumer behaviour.

Offering personalised content is clearly very important. Companies like us can help those companies to make something very different from what they currently do, not just from a tech perspective but even from a strategy perspective or marketing perspective. Smaller companies or organisations probably don’t have the resources to do things alone. We help companies like that launch different solutions in different markets because every market is different. We can help companies according to the geolocation or market registration.

What are some of the challenges being faced by the sports streaming industry at the moment?

The biggest challenge in sports organisations is balancing profit and loss. There are plenty of sports organisations out there – probably 60-70% – who have yet to launch direct-to-consumer video streaming services. That is a huge market, but at the same time, they’re tiny organisations. Relaunching a service is always about the product but also how much resources the vendor will put into it. What could be the marketing strategy? How can you set up your business strategy from a pricing perspective? How you can tackle the Indian or Brazilian market versus the US, UK or Spanish market? It takes so much expertise to help organisations thrive and to succeed.

How is ViewLift leveraging new technologies to tackle these challenges?

We are talking about artificial intelligence and blockchain. Everything that we do is our own IP, so if we talk about having a very strong recommendation engine that is based on machine learning algorithms that our team created to help companies that have thousands of hours of content in their video libraries. We are working towards different projects in artificial intelligence and working closely with many partners, from cloud partners to fan engagement partners and advertising partners.

We also like to hear a lot of feedback from clients, so we need to have conversations with our clients on a weekly or monthly basis to collect information to use as a starting point for our journey. We have a lot of roadmaps depending on geolocation, because you need to understand what the struggles are in each country. Innovation is great when it’s in Western countries, but there are many areas where good quality video streaming is more important because you have to get the basics right first.

To find out more about the changes happening in the sports streaming sector, tune into Episode 29 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast here.

Differentiating Your Satellite Company

Posted on August 9, 2024 by Katja Schmieding

As the satellite industry expands, differentiating your product or service has become more important than ever. On Episode 32 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, we were joined by Adeline Pitrois, the Head of Sales at Latitude, to talk about how the company are setting itself apart by catering to a specific client base. Read on to find out more about how to differentiate your own offerings.

Why should a small-sat or constellation operator choose a dedicated small or light launch provider rather than the larger providers or ride-share agreements?

Ride-share programmes are very good if you’re at the very beginning of your deployment or if you’re in your IoT phase. But dedicated lunches will allow you to optimise your constellation deployment because it will help you deploy your constellations faster. In the end, it’s a question of revenue, which is important when you start to deploy your business and your constellation. It’s also a question of managing your own lunch solution. If you have your own, you do not need to share it with others and to be ready at a certain time. You are also not constrained by specific arbiters who decide to follow you.

When you develop a constellation programme, you want to manage it from the beginning to the end. That is what dedicated launches offer you. It’s very competitive because people very often think that if they buy their own launch solution it will be very expensive. Now, we always speak about the total cost to orbit. I try to change how people think about it – you cannot compare different solutions using the price per kilo, because you have only part of the price when you do that. What is interesting to compare is what we call the total cost to orbit. That starts when your satellite is ready on the ground and ends when new satellites start operating in space. If you take all the costs related to your constellation or the way you will put your satellites in orbit, then you realise that even a dedicated launch solution is competitive compared to a rideshare solution.

This is something nobody can do right now, because we do not have that type of solution except with Rocket Lab, which is currently operating in that market. People need to change the way they see dedicated launch solutions to consider that they are totally free to do what they want with the launch solution and can design 100% of their constellation without any constraint from from from the launch services.

What differentiates an offering like Zephyr from other providers or solutions?

When we speak about competition, it’s often mentioned that we have direct competitors and indirect competitors. Indirect competition could be the biggest launch solution, like the one from either RSA, because we are not targeting the same markets. We do not offer the same the same solution. We could have some projects that overlap, but we have really different targeted markets.

Direct competitors are all Microline solutions like Xavier. The one with the 200-kilogramme capacity in Lille Rocket Lab is a direct competitor. However, latitude will offer a different solution, and we’ll offer the best solution at a very competitive price. We will also offer a very flexible solution, thanks to different elements – one of which is our launch rate. We will target 50 launches per year because that is the key to offering our customers all the different advantages. When you are launching 50 satellites per year, you offer a huge flexibility to your customers, who are then able to deploy a constellation in less than 10 months. Combining these elements at the very beginning of the project will allow us to become a leader in the market.

To hear more about differentiating your satellite products, tune into Episode 32 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast here.

Mobile Application Security

Posted on August 2, 2024 by Daisy Steel

Mobile application security is a growing part of the Cyber Security industry. To help us understand and address those challenges, we were joined by Chris Roeckl, the Chief Product Officer at Appdome, on Episode 31 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast. He shared his perspectives on the state of the sector, his insights into the key challenges of keeping mobile applications secure and its impact on compliance. Read on to find out what he said.

How do you assess the state of the mobile security space as a whole?

The mobile app security market is rapidly changing. There are lots of reasons for that. Probably the most important one is that mobile apps are now the dominant channel for interacting with digital brands. It’s not about websites anymore, it’s all about mobile. The bad news here is that people who break into networks are zeroing in on mobile apps, which is driving the mobile security market.

The challenge, particularly in today’s economy, is that CISOs and other decision-makers within mobile app security don’t have as many resources as they had in the past. They are either freezing their hiring or letting go of developed cybersecurity engineering teams just to cut costs. It’s like that old analogy of cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it is the reality of business today. They’re also trying to zero in on how to do more with less because

budgets are under scrutiny. The thing is, bad actors aren’t taking the day off because of budget cuts and personnel reductions. The number of attacks just continues to grow and grow and grow.

We don’t like to focus on scaring our customers or prospects, we want to help them. We don’t spend much time talking about the bad actors doing bad things, but they are, and the mobile brands we support know that. We don’t have to take that message to the market, so our focus is on getting them to an outcome. How do we how do we solve this problem? Every mobile brand’s challenge is unique, and our goal is to make sure that we can solve those unique challenges for them.

How are these key challenges within mobile application security addressed?

The first thing that you have to realise is that web-based and desktop apps basically all have the same technological components, which makes it fairly simple to solve security problems. Now, in the mobile world, apps are built with 15 different development frameworks, which you can mix and match. You may have heard of things like Swift, Java, or Kotlin. They’re all different languages that you can code in. That creates unique scenarios. It’s not homogenous; it’s heterogeneous, which makes mobile app security difficult.

The other thing is that there are a couple of different approaches to solving that. If you go back 5, or 10 years, software development kits were developed by security companies for mobile, and they basically give you some code. Your job as an enterprise or mobile brand was to add and maintain that code in your own application, which had its own challenges. The most simple challenge was that the software development kit you got might only work with 3 of the 15 development frameworks, so as a mobile developer, you have to make a choice to say either I need to rewrite my app to get in the security bits, or I need to go look for some other solution and then cobble it all together.

At Appdome, we decided to take a completely different look at the market. We built a machine that takes account of all these frameworks and then builds an implementation of the security based on the buttons you tick on the platform for the security protections you need, and delivers that solution, with no coding needed. In a world where you’re losing resources, we think the movement to more of a machine-based approach to mobile app security is going to win the day.

How does that impact the compliance side of things?

Cyber compliance is a really critical topic. Firstly, there are external regulatory compliance requirements. Secondly, there are a bunch of internal-facing requirements. Mobile brands oftentimes publish some sort of cyber pledge on their website for general security, saying ‘We protect your data this way.’ What is becoming very apparent is that those cyber pledges apply to the mobile app too – it’s not just about the website anymore. It’s not just about the way that your data is protected in the backend infrastructure; it is all about the mobile end user using a mobile app.

Being able to do things like ensure that the cyber protections are actually built into the app is a cyber requirement, but the work is done by developers. So how do you bring the developers and cyber team together? Do you produce artefacts within the production process that say, ‘This encryption was added’, ‘Obfuscation was added’, or do you reverse engineer whatever the features are that the mobile brand is looking for? The ability to do things like UI testing is super important too. All of those compliance elements have to fit together into this jigsaw puzzle called mobile app development. Over the last two years, we’ve seen this go from kind of a low-level thing to a high priority within cyber organisations.

To find out more about securing mobile applications, tune into Episode 31 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here.