Engineers in our Resilient Cyber Aerospace Testbed (RCAT) are keeping pace with advanced cyber threats by creating solutions to safeguard aircraft. MITRE’s experts test new concepts in specialized, secure environments, getting our cyber defense technology in the field quickly.
Cockpit Resiliency: Protecting Aircraft from Data Network Attacks
If a military pilot flying faster than the speed of sound gets an alert advising them to lower the landing gear, they can be certain something is fishy. Incongruous messages are just one tactic a cyber adversary could deploy to disrupt a flight.
As cyber attacks become more advanced, ubiquitous, and invasive, pilots must be hyper-vigilant, making already complex cockpit and airspace environments exponentially more complicated.
“Developing cyber defenses is more challenging as the sophistication of attackers increases,” says Jeff Higginson, chief cyber engineer in MITRE’s Air and Space Forces Center. “Our job is to ensure vulnerabilities are understood so that we can better predict when they may happen and prevent them from becoming serious issues.”
Higginson runs MITRE’s Resilient Cyber Aerospace Testbed, or RCAT, a lab based on MITRE’s Bedford, Mass. campus. It is outfitted with aircraft simulators and tools to pressure-test real and potential attack scenarios.
Ultimately, our aim is to get these low-cost solutions out into the world as quickly as possible, so, as the cyber threat evolves, we stay ahead of it.
The RCAT team develops prototypes and licenses them at low- or no-cost to private companies to who can then produce and sell them at scale. As the operator of FFRDCs, or federally funded research and development centers, MITRE works for the public good, making technology accessible to government, academia, and industry.
“Ultimately, our goal is to get solutions to both the military and commercial sectors as quickly as possible,” Higginson says. “So, as the cyber threat evolves, we stay ahead of it.”
—Enterprise Communications (Catherine Trifiletti, Joshua Gottschling, Sondra Taillon, and Mike Mahoney)
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