Establishing and Maintaining Trust for an Airborne Network

ABSTRACT: Distributed systems face distributed threats. These threats can only be countered with a distributed trustworthiness architecture that measures and enforces trust across a network. In Phase I, Real-Time Innovations (RTI) proposed two different components of trustworthiness: an a priori component, which classifies a node before it joins the network, and a dynamic component, which is updated depending on the node"s behavior while communicating. Based on these models, we proposed a trustworthiness index. We also identified components needed by an airborne network to compute and enforce the trustworthiness index. We implemented a prototype of a trust agent that computes both the a priori and dynamic trustworthiness indexes. In Phase II, RTI will further refine the structured assurance case models for both the a priori and dynamic trustworthiness indexes. We will also implement tools that assess behavioral changes and update the trustworthiness. Finally, we will demonstrate all the provided capabilities on a representative airborne network. The proposed work will create a practical trust architecture within RTI"s TRL 9 middleware product. RTI will also pursue standardization. The standards-based trustworthiness infrastructure will mitigate the risk of cyber attacks for many real-world applications, including the multi-service MADL airborne network. BENEFIT: The Trustworthiness Index infrastructure developed will enable the detection of subtle, complex embedded system software vulnerabilities across collaborative network elements. As airborne systems become more interconnected, maintaining absolute knowledge and assurance of the sources and recipients of information becomes a virtually impossible task. Therefore, having a measure of trust becomes an important tool in assessing and managing risk. The RTI approach has the benefit of flexibility in that multiple parameters can be used dynamically to make decisions and take action based on the trust information. It provides an additional tier in an overall defense-in-depth security posture. This project has clear applications both in DoD and commercial markets. All DoD customers requiring safe-and-secure, standards-based distributed computing can benefit. However, the avionics, unmanned vehicles, vetronics, cross-domain solutions, and C4ISR communities especially will benefit by having a middleware product suite that provides a foundational building block of trust for implementing heterogeneous distributed architecture concepts. Multiple DoD Prime contractors have expressed interest in this project and several letters of support from commercial and defense firms are included in this proposal.