Commercial Solutions for Flight Line Reprogramming

Today, missiles are pulled from storage, reprogrammed to the latest software, and loaded into the launcher prior to mission start. Reprogramming each missile individually imposes an enormous logistics burden on aircraft armament support personnel. To ease this burden, the Air Force is developing a Common Weapons Launcher that will allow multiple missiles to be reprogrammed simultaneously after loading in the launcher. The Armament Directorate requires a secure point-to-point wireless toolset that can transmit SECRET level data from an Airman’s handheld device to the launcher on the flightline to enable this capability. A secure wireless system on a chip (SoC) device is also required to perform weapon reprogramming. In this Direct-to-Phase II SBIR effort, Caliola proposes to develop and demonstrate a solution that leverages non-traditional cybersecurity data protection techniques to address both of these requirements.