Clearing the Skies of Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities from the Ground Up

Aircraft provide increased connectivity for passengers but also allow increased bandwidth to implement new services such as predictive maintenance, aircraft tracking, and flight data updates. However, this new connectivity introduces new security threats and exposes new vulnerabilities to aircraft that were previously isolated from commercial ground systems. To protect against these threats new standards are evolving that show how to analyse and protect systems, whilst at the same time maintaining the critical safety requirements. To examines potential threats caused by this new connectivity, we will cover a Cybersecurity assessment following the well-known information security principles of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability as applied to avionic systems. We will examine current techniques for Cybersecurity defence, mapping the new RTCA DO-356A standard to both a commercial implementation of both an airborne ARINC 653 environment and a ground based Linux implementation.