KAIperShield and Cyber in Space have signed a business development and customer engagement agreement aimed at expanding access to cyber resilience and mission assurance capabilities developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory across Australia, New Zealand and the wider Indo-Pacific.
Under the agreement, KAIperShield has appointed Cyber in Space (CIS) as a business development and customer engagement partner. CIS will identify and develop agreed business opportunities, support engagement with prospective customers and partners, and assist in progressing opportunities through the business development and procurement lifecycle.
The agreement also provides for the potential delivery of ongoing customer engagement services following contract awards.
The partnership links KAIperShield’s AULIS software platform for mission-focused cyber resilience with Cyber in Space’s expertise across the space, aerospace, defence and critical infrastructure sectors.
Lt. Gen. USAF (Ret). Larry James, CEO and co-founder of KAIperShield, said the Indo-Pacific represented an important market as organisations confront increasingly complex and interconnected mission systems. James is also a strategic advisor to the Australasian Space Innovation Institute and professor of practice in space innovation at Monash University.
“Cyber resilience is ultimately about mission continuity. Organisations need to understand not only where vulnerabilities exist, but how compromise can propagate across their systems and what that means for their ability to continue critical operations,” James said.
“Our partnership with Cyber in Space provides an important pathway for bringing AULIS to organisations across Australia, New Zealand and the wider Indo-Pacific. The region has sophisticated space, defence and critical infrastructure sectors, and we see significant opportunities to apply mission-focused cyber resilience to some of their most consequential systems.”
Chris Cubbage, director and co-founder of Cyber in Space, said the agreement reflected the increasing convergence of cybersecurity, operational resilience and mission assurance.
“Space, defence and critical infrastructure operators are managing highly interconnected environments where a cyber incident can rapidly move beyond an IT security problem and become an operational or mission-level event,” Cubbage said.
“KAIperShield brings a fundamentally different perspective to that challenge. Understanding how compromise can propagate through an architecture, what critical functions are exposed and where resilience measures will have the greatest operational impact is increasingly important.”
“For Cyber in Space, this partnership provides an opportunity to introduce this capability into the Indo-Pacific and work directly with customers to address real mission and operational resilience requirements. Our focus will be on building meaningful customer engagements and identifying applications where the technology can deliver measurable operational value.”
KAIperShield said its technology has been applied to complex NASA/JPL mission environments, with a focus on systems engineering and architecture-level cyber analysis intended to identify mission-critical dependencies and engineer resilience into complex systems.
AULIS is designed to help operators of complex cyber-physical systems assess not only whether vulnerabilities exist, but how a successful cyber compromise could propagate through interconnected systems and affect operational and mission objectives.
According to KAIperShield, the AULIS platform models cyber-physical systems, networks, dependencies, trust relationships and mission functions to determine how cyber compromise can propagate through a system and affect critical operations. The company said this approach can be used to identify critical dependencies, evaluate resilience and prioritise investments based on their impact on mission continuity.
The companies said the collaboration comes as space, defence and critical infrastructure operators face increasingly interconnected technology environments spanning information technology, operational technology, communications, cloud services, ground infrastructure and remotely operated assets.
For the space sector, they said cyber resilience increasingly needs to be addressed across the complete mission architecture, from ground systems and communications to mission operations, payloads and orbital assets.
Through the agreement, Cyber in Space will provide an Indo-Pacific business development and engagement pathway for KAIperShield, initially focusing on Australia and New Zealand while supporting expansion into other regional markets as agreed by the organisations.
The partnership will target opportunities where cyber resilience is directly connected to operational continuity and mission success, including space systems, defence, government infrastructure, power and energy, and industrial and operational technology environments.
The companies also linked the agreement to a broader shift in cybersecurity—from an emphasis on preventing every possible compromise towards engineering systems capable of maintaining critical functions when cyber incidents occur—citing the growing role of AI and autonomous cyber capabilities.
