Protecting flight critical systems against security threats in commercial air transportation

Abstract

Today's commercial aircraft are e-Enabled, with networked connectivity to ground stations for real-time health monitoring, location tracking, and maintenance. Once the systems are connected to the network, security is a major challenge. Connected systems are vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. To counteract the cybersecurity threats, a system of layered security measures must be applied from the system power-up. A hardware root-of-trust is a secure foundation for implementing secure systems. It must provide the reliability essential for DO-254 compliant systems, and industry standard cryptographic algorithms and protocols. This is possible through the use of flash-based secure FPGAs which provide advanced security capabilities, SRAM-PUF based key management, and anti-tamper countermeasures. The advanced security and reliability capabilities of the flash-based secure FPGAs meet the requirements for hardware root-of-trust in avionics applications. The e-Enabled aircraft must have the security measures to authenticate software from power-up, securely communicate with ground stations, and perform secure remote software updates. This paper presents a security framework and the methodologies necessary to implement these security measures using flash-based secure FPGAs as hardware root-of-trust.