Trusted Architecture for Airborne Networks

Next generation systems are increasingly network centric and reliant on collaborative data exchanges to perform critical functions. In order for these networked systems to meet their mission objectives and provide decision makers with timely and accurate information the assurance levels and trustworthiness of the systems and the data they provide must be evaluated. These complex entities are often systems-of-systems with layers of complexity and nested capabilities. Assessing the trustworthiness of these systems requires an analysis framework that can represent these complex layered systems at multiples levels of abstraction. We propose a comprehensive analysis framework, supported by model based analysis tools to address the challenge of determining the trustworthiness of complex distributed systems-of-systems. The analysis framework is based on the WWTG EDICT tool suite which is capable of performing architectural analysis for information assurance, reliability and safety system aspects and supports open tool interfaces through the Eclipse platform. Our proposed framework can evaluate trustworthiness at multiple levels of abstraction and across the many system aspects that contribute to trust. BENEFIT: Our proposed approach contains many benefits for the assessment of trustworthiness of airborne networked systems architectures. The trust evaluations are set in an architecture framework that provides traceable and consistent representations of complex systems at multiple levels of abstraction enabling agile analysis and navigation of large systems. The trust metrics are calculated using architectural analysis methods for information assurance, reliability and safety; enabling the full scope of trust to be examined within a single set of integrated analysis tools. Our proposed tool infrastructure is open to integration of component level trust assessment by third part solutions. These low level trust assessments can then be put into a system context and used to assess the trust of the system overall.