Founded in 2020 in Spain and incorporated in Italy in 2023, Osmium Italy is a young cybersecurity company with a mission: safeguarding the digital transformation of the aerospace industry. Its team aims to enable the secure use of digitalization, connectivity and software-based spacecraft to ensure the safety, integrity and resilience of its clients' missions and operations.
The start-up, incubated in I3P and in ESA BIC Turin, has quickly gained a prominent role in the space cybersecurity sector, initiating extensive projects with large companies in the sector - for example, Thales Alenia Space - and actively participating in European-level initiatives such as the EU Space Information Sharing Analysis Centre (ISAC), of which it is one of 12 founding companies.
With the support of ESA BIC Turin, Osmium was able to access essential resources for its development, including technical support, mentoring and funding. This has enabled the company to develop advanced cybersecurity solutions for space systems, such as Osmium OS: a secure, turnkey, pre-configured Linux solution for embedded systems designed to accelerate the development and integration process for teams with little or no experience in cybersecurity, ensuring a secure state of the software used during the mission (which corresponds to the product lifecycle).
Osmium OS is not merely an operating system, but a set of tools that can be used in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) mode to simplify the creation, compilation and security evaluation of embedded Linux images.
The SATELIKE and HILINK projects
The SATELIKE project, an acronym for Satellite Lightweight Internet Key Exchange, was started for ESA ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Centre) and its main objective is the design, implementation and testing of a lightweight version of the Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2) mechanism that includes post-quantum cryptographic key exchanges.
Osmium is coordinating the project, which is supported by Thales Alenia Space Italia for the user perspective and testing facilities and by Università Politecnica delle Marche for cryptography research; the startup is also in charge of designing and implementing the new protocol. In order to ensure widespread adoption in the satellite telecommunications community and that the modifications to the IKEv2 protocol designed in this project are integrated into the “terrestrial” protocol, Osmium will issue a Request for Comments for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF RFC) together with ESA to formalize the proposed protocol.
In parallel, the HILINK project launched for ESA ESOC (European Space Operations Centre) aims to develop and test a prototype software node for Disruption-Tolerant Networking for the Earth segment, to be used in end-to-end data communication architectures, to support high-speed Direct-to-Earth space links with a data rate of up to 10 Gbit/s.
Osmium is involved, as a sub-contractor of Thales Alenia Space Italia, in the design of the protocol modifications needed to achieve the high data rate and the Bundle Protocol Security (BPSEC) security and configuration measures over the protocol. The start-up also supports the development of the testbed for testing the solution.
The collaboration between Osmium and Thales Alenia Space Italia in the HILINK and SATELIKE projects is therefore definitely relevant for the Italian space industry: through the new made-in-Italy solutions, these projects intend to improve the security and efficiency of satellite communications and help protect space infrastructure from present and future threats.
