New Alerting Technology Stops Airplane Hackers at System Level

Cleveland’s concerns are well founded. Last

a

year, hackers bombarded the aviation sector with more than 1,000 attacks per month. The industry now faces cybersecurity threats posed by a range of sources, from individuals to well-funded nation states. And the threats are not just aimed at Raytheon or airlines — increasing levels of connectivity between program partners, suppliers and service providers increase the industry’s overall vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Waltham, Massachusetts-based Raytheon has spent the past year funding its own answer to this threat — a cyber intrusion detection system for flight-critical avionics systems.

The system focuses on the avionics bus — an aircraft’s main data intersection point that interacts with the cockpit’s electronic components that feed key navigation and communications systems.

“We asked ourselves where can something happen statistically in the multitude of areas and decided to look at the avionics bus as the vehicle for a bad guy to introduce malware, for example,” explained Bob Delorge, VP of transportation and support services within Raytheon’s intelligence, information and services division.

“Raytheon understands how a system should work — how a handoff should occur,” he added, noting that the intrusion detection system looks for any abnormalities in the software code and then alerts the cockpit via a warning light. The pilot can consider the information and validate if there is a problem.

http://www.aviationtoday.com/2017/12/11/new-alerting-technology-stops-airplane-hackers-system-level/