Session 1B: Operationally Representative Data and Cybersecurity for Avionics
Dr. Steven Movit earned bachelor's degrees in Astrophysics and Statistics from Rice University in Houston, Texas, followed by a doctorate from Penn State University in Astronomy and Astrophysics, where he worked on the IceCube telescope.
Dr. Movit joined the Institute for Defense Analyses in 2011, where he has concentrated on aircraft survivability, including cyber survivability and electronic warfare, mainly supporting analyses for the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation. Dr. Movit started a "non-IP" cyber lab at IDA in 2021 which has developed hardware-in-the-loop simulators for research and training.
This talk discusses the ARINC 429 standard and its inherent lack of security, demonstrates proven mission effects in a hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) simulator, and presents a data set collected from real avionics.
ARINC 429 is a ubiquitous data bus for civil avionics, enabling safe and reliable communication between devices from disparate manufacturers. However, ARINC 429 lacks any form of encryption or authentication, making it an inherently insecure communication protocol and rendering any connected avionics vulnerable to a range of attacks.
We constructed a HITL simulator with ARINC 429 buses to explore these vulnerabilities, and to identify potential mission effects. The HITL simulator includes commercial off-the-shelf avionics hardware including a multi-function display, an Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, as well as a realistic flight simulator.
We performed a denial-of-service attack against the multi-function display via a compromised transmit node on an ARINC 429 bus, using commercially available tools, which succeeded in disabling important navigational aids. This simple replay attack demonstrates how effectively a “leave-behind” device can cause serious mission effects.
This proven adversarial effect on physical avionics illustrates the risk inherent in ARINC 429 and the need for the ability to detect, mitigate, and recover from these attacks. One potential solution is an intrusion detection system (IDS) trained using data collected from the electrical properties of the physical bus. Although previous research has demonstrated the feasibility of an IDS on an ARINC 429 bus, none have been trained on data generated by actual avionics hardware.
Session Materials: https://dataworks.testscience.org/wp-...