KAIperShield and Cyber in Space have signed a business development and customer engagement agreement to expand mission-focused cyber resilience capabilities across Australia, New Zealand and the wider Indo-Pacific.
Under the agreement, Cyber in Space will identify business opportunities, engage prospective customers and partners, and support opportunities through procurement. It may also provide ongoing customer engagement services after contracts are awarded.
The partnership combines KAIperShield’s AULIS platform with Cyber in Space’s expertise across the space, aerospace, defence and critical infrastructure sectors. AULIS models cyber-physical systems, networks, dependencies, trust relationships and mission functions to assess how a compromise could move through an architecture and affect critical operations.
The platform is based on technology developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and licensed through Caltech. KAIperShield said the technology has been applied to complex NASA/JPL mission environments, where identifying dependencies and protecting mission-critical functions are central to operational resilience.
“Cyber resilience is ultimately about mission continuity,” said Lt Gen USAF (Ret) Larry James, chief executive and co-founder of KAIperShield. “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 the agreement provided a pathway for bringing AULIS to organisations in Australia, New Zealand and other Indo-Pacific markets, which include sophisticated space, defence and critical infrastructure sectors.
Cyber in Space co-founder Chris Cubbage said the partnership reflected the 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,” he said.
The collaboration will initially focus on Australia and New Zealand, while supporting expansion into other regional markets. Target opportunities include space systems, defence, government infrastructure, energy, industrial systems and operational technology environments.
The announcement comes as Australia strengthens its critical infrastructure requirements. The government’s 2026 Enhanced Critical Infrastructure Risk Management Program Rules require relevant entities to take a more structured approach to managing cyber and other risks, including access to critical systems and the suitability of critical workers.
Space operators face particular resilience challenges because missions depend on connected ground systems, communications, cloud services, payloads, orbital assets and remotely operated infrastructure. A 2025 RMIT report recommended secure-by-design practices, Zero Trust architecture, stronger supply-chain security and a dedicated resilience action plan for Australia’s space infrastructure.
The partnership reflects a broader shift from trying to prevent every compromise towards engineering systems that can sustain critical functions when an incident occurs. For Indo-Pacific operators, architecture-level modelling could support faster prioritisation of recovery investments by showing which dependencies matter most to mission continuity.
