Professional Affiliation

Cybersecurity Senior Project Leader, Cyber Assessments and Research Department, The Aerospace Corporation

Expert Bio

Mr. Bailey currently works for the Aerospace Corporation within the Cybersecurity Subdivision as a Senior Cybersecurity Project Manager and is a former GS-15 at NASA where he led various cybersecurity efforts and was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal for his landmark cybersecurity work in 2019. Mr. Bailey has spent much of his 16-year professional career supporting space agencies like National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 

Mr. Bailey has extensive experience in the test and evaluation of systems and technology using high-fidelity digital twins with specialization in cybersecurity. In his work at NASA, he built and managed a software testing and research laboratory to include a robust cybersecurity range containing many digital twins of spacecraft technology. Mr. Bailey also led information assurance and cybersecurity activities conducting independent technical assessments of many of NASA's most critical space and ground missions. Mr. Bailey’s cybersecurity efforts at NASA included vulnerability assessments, infusing secure coding principles in missions, counteracting the threat landscape by infusing security analyses in the standard IV&V workflow and working within the CCSDS security working group to develop international security standards. 

More recently while at Aerospace Mr. Bailey has focused on developing a cyber range to support penetration testing training and in-the-lab evaluation of customers’ implementations, performing vulnerability assessments and penetration testing activities for multiple customers, and performing cybersecurity research on ground systems and spacecraft systems to better position the federal government with respect to protection our critical space infrastructure. Also, Mr. Bailey presented at DEF CON 2020 on how to exploit spacecraft in addition to being the primary author on two whitepapers on spacecraft cybersecurity which may be found here. In April of 2021, Mr. Bailey authored a report titled Cybersecurity Protections for Spacecraft: A Threat Based Approach which was outlines concepts of defense-in-depth protection necessary to protect spacecraft, and then a threat-oriented approach to space cyber risk assessment. The ultimate result of this report is a set of products that define risk driven requirements to utilize during acquisition and operations for better space system protection.