Panelist: A New Cold War in Space: What This Could Mean for Governments

Prof. Gregory Falco has been at the forefront of space system and critical infrastructure security in both industry and academia for the past decade. Falco is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Assured Autonomy and the Civil and Systems Engineering Department. He is the Director of the Aerospace ADVERSARY (Autonomy, Defense and Vulnerability Exploitation for Resilient, Secure and Assured Risk/Yield) Lab at Johns Hopkins. The ADVERSARY designs and develops future aerospace technology enabling secure, resilient and assured autonomous space infrastructure operations. His research entitled Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems was highly influential in the development of Space Policy Directive-5, which shared the same title. Falco was the former co-founder and CEO of the blockchain-based industrial control security company NeuroMesh Inc., which was acquired in 2022. He has been listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 for his inventions and contributions to critical infrastructure cyber security, is a Fulbright Scholar and is the recipient of the DARPA RISER and DARPA’s Young Faculty Award for work on building a zero-trust marketplace ecosystem for space systems. Prof. Falco serves as a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Space Systems Critical Infrastructure Working Group and has been awarded contracts relating to space system security for AFRL, US Space Force, NASA and DARPA. He is also a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Falco completed his PhD at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Master’s degree at Columbia University and Bachelor’s degree at Cornell University.