TIDAS: Trusted Identity for Autonomous Systems

Future USAF deployments of autonomous systems require secure and reliable communications to facilitate decentralized command and control. Traditional cyber security, trust, and identity models that work well in enterprise networks are incompatible with decentralized operations and insufficient for tactical environments. Secure decentralized command and control demands zero trust network access, which, in turn, requires decentralized identity management. Grier Forensics proposes development of Trusted Identity for Autonomous Systems (TIDAS), a new decentralized identity management framework for USAF autonomous systems. TIDAS facilitates zero trust network communications with no impact to applications on the network. TIDAS ensures autonomous command, control, and collaboration is transparently and continuously authenticated, authorized, and mutually trusted by each participating entity. TIDAS adapts the state-of-the-art in self-sovereign identity management to tactical networks of autonomous systems. To design, implement, test, and demonstrate TIDAS, we will prototype its architecture within FireSky, GrierÆs cyber defense solution for USAF airborne tactical platforms. When combined with FireSky's cyber defense, TIDAS will provide a complete implementation of zero trust principles for USAF autonomous systems.