Before Astronauts Return to the Moon, Someone Has to Secure Its Internet

NASA is wiring up the Moon right now. The harder question is whose security rules will govern that network, and that decision is being made in standards meetings, not on launch pads.

The vehicle is LunaNet, a NASA-run data and communications relay designed to extend internet-style networking to astronauts, rovers, landers, and surface orbiters around the Moon. Anchored on the Artemis program and the next crewed lunar landing, LunaNet treats the Moon the way cell towers treated the continental United States in the 1990s: as a place to build a backbone that everything else can route through.

The protocol layer matters. LunaNet runs Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), a store-and-forward scheme that holds packets until a link is available rather than dropping them the way TCP would. On Earth, losing a few milliseconds of signal is a nuisance. In cislunar space, the same gap can stretch to seconds, and a rover out of line-of-sight needs its data to wait, not vanish.

The transport layer is where the security fight actually lives. NASA and its partners are weighing four options: 4G/5G LTE over radio frequencies, future 6G, gallium-nitride RF amplifiers (a high-power, heat-tolerant radio chip), and laser links between satellites, called optical inter-satellite links. Each carries a different security profile. Lasers, expected to take market share as data rates approach 100 Gbps, are harder to eavesdrop on because the beam is narrow and the signal falls off fast with distance. RF is easier to jam and intercept but works through dust storms and lunar regolith that would scatter a laser.

Picking a transport also picks a threat model. As SemiEngineering reports, the security stack has to be specified at the same time as the radios. The required components are not new on Earth: a hardware root of trust (a tamper-resistant chip that proves the device is what it claims to be), secure boot, measured boot, post-quantum cryptography, over-the-air software updates, and radiation-tolerant FPGAs (reprogrammable chips that can be patched after launch) so the security posture can change mid-mission. Per SemiEngineering, the same commercial and intelligence assets heading to the lunar surface turn the relay into a high-value target for ransomware and nation-state intrusion.

Synopsys is already embedded in two NASA efforts. The company is running electromagnetic analysis on spacesuit charging hardware and, with Cesium at NASA Glenn, helping stand up a 3GPP cellular network on the lunar surface. The 3GPP work is the standards battle: lunar 4G/5G is a candidate transport, and the encryption, identity, and key-management profiles baked into 3GPP releases will be the default for any operator that wants to use the network.

Compute is the third leg. NASA's High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) project, awarded in August 2022, is building a next-generation flight processor rated through 2040 and beyond. The reason it matters for security is that lunar and Mars missions cannot phone home for every decision. Radiation, communication latency, and bandwidth constraints push more data filtering and autonomy onto the spacecraft, which means more code running on radiation-tolerant hardware far from a ground station. A bug or a backdoor in that code is not a patch-and-reboot problem; it is a mission-level problem.

Edge compute helps. Local filtering shrinks the data flowing back to Earth and shrinks the attack surface that comes with it. But the relay itself still touches almost every byte, because a rover on the far side of the Moon has no direct line to a ground antenna, and a Mars-bound mission staging through cislunar space will route navigation, telemetry, and crew health data through the same hardware. The relay becomes a chokepoint, and chokepoints are where standards wars are won or lost.

The window is narrow. Artemis crewed lunar surface missions, LunaNet relay launches, and the HPSC processor rollout are converging on the next eighteen to twenty-four months. Whatever root-of-trust, post-quantum, and over-the-air-update profile ships in that window becomes the default for the next decade, because no one rewrites a space-qualified security stack after launch. NASA can still choose to mandate open standards, but every delay hands the default to whoever shows up with a working spec first, agency, contractor, or rival space program.

Standards bodies, led by NASA and the partners writing 3GPP profiles and DTN extensions now, are picking a security baseline. Open standards let new operators plug in. Closed profiles treat the lunar network the way early cellular networks treated roaming: as a club with a guest list.

NASA's HPSC processor is slated for first silicon later this decade, and LunaNet relay nodes are scheduled to launch alongside the first crewed Artemis surface landings. The security stack that rides on those first missions is the one the rest of the lunar economy inherits.