The IEEE Standards Association approved IEEE 3536-2026, titled the IEEE Standard for Space System Cybersecurity Design, on March 26, 2026, and the finished document reached publication around July. It is the first IEEE standard built specifically to walk engineering teams through a cybersecurity design process segment by segment: ground stations, the spacecraft bus and payload, the communications link, and the software that ties all three together.
Satellites have traditionally been designed around weight, power budgets and radiation tolerance, with security added afterward if at all. The clearest example of what that costs is still the February 24, 2022 attack on Viasat's KA-SAT network, which the US, UK, EU and Canada formally attributed to the Russian military that May. The wiper malware disabled tens of thousands of modems across Ukraine and Europe and knocked roughly 5,800 German wind turbines offline as a side effect. IEEE 3536-2026 is an attempt to push decisions like modem authentication and update signing back into the design phase, before a spacecraft is built rather than after it is in orbit.
Three Years From Proposal to Published Standard
The project traces back to a broader proposal, P3349, the Standard for Space System Cybersecurity, authorized by IEEE in February 2023. A narrower companion project, P3536, was authorized two years later to define the technical design process on its own rather than the full list of controls. The IEEE SA Standards Board approved the finished 3536 text at its March 26, 2026 meeting, alongside dozens of unrelated standards up for sign-off that day.
Gregory Falco, an assistant professor at Cornell, has chaired the working group since it formed in 2023. MIT Technology Review reported in October 2024 that the effort had already drawn more than 200 participants from over 25 countries, a sign of how many governments and satellite operators wanted a say in whatever baseline eventually emerged.
What the Standard Actually Covers
According to the working group's own project page, 3536-2026 defines a component-level design process rather than a fixed checklist of requirements. Engineering teams work through threat identification and control selection separately for the ground segment, the space vehicle, the link segment and the integration layer that connects them, adapting the process to a mission's actual architecture instead of applying one generic set of rules to every program from a CubeSat to a geostationary communications bus.
Voluntary Until a Contract Says Otherwise
Like most IEEE standards, 3536-2026 carries no legal force. CyberScoop reported in 2023 that Falco framed the working group's goal as retiring entire categories of security flaws from future spacecraft, with adoption left entirely to whoever is paying for the satellite. NIST reached a similar point in July 2023 with NIST IR 8270, a voluntary guide applying the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to commercial satellite operations. Its authors, Matthew Scholl and Theresa Suloway, wrote that the document stopped short of addressing risk to the satellite vehicle itself, the exact gap 3536-2026 is partly designed to close.
Voluntary frameworks tend to gain force once a large buyer starts requiring them. The Space Force's Infrastructure Asset Pre-Assessment program, known as IA-Pre, already requires commercial satcom vendors seeking Pentagon contracts to implement 477 controls drawn from the NIST 800-53 high-impact baseline, plus an additional set of controls specific to space vehicles. A similar path, in which a procurement office or an underwriter starts citing 3536-2026 as its expected baseline, is the most plausible route from voluntary standard to de facto requirement.
Brussels Is Writing the Mandatory Version in Parallel
The European Union is pursuing a different route to the same goal. The EU Space Act's cybersecurity chapter, still being negotiated between the European Parliament and the Council, would impose mandatory risk-management duties on covered operators, including incident detection and reporting, cryptography and supply chain security, rather than leaving the choice to contract terms. The Council's Irish presidency circulated an updated draft on October 29, 2026, but the technical detail of what counts as compliant has been pushed into implementing acts that follow the main regulation, leaving an opening for a standard like 3536-2026 to become the reference point regulators reach for.
The broader P3349 project, meant to define the specific controls and countermeasures that 3536-2026's design process is supposed to produce, remains listed by IEEE as an active, unpublished project with no release date set.
CyberScoop first reported on Gregory Falco's IEEE working group in 2023, three years before the design standard it produced was approved.
