Secured and Robust Communications on Urban Air Mobility Networks (SRCUMAN)

Shared Spectrum Company (SSC) and the C4I and Cyber Center at George Mason University (GMU) develop and implement the Secured and Robust Communications on Urban Air Mobility Networks (SRCUMAN) system. SSC’s SRCUMAN is a decentralized and distributed security solution that performs validation of communications on UAM networks.  It achieves low resource consumption, minimal latency, and enhanced security on the air vehicles and networks with a fine-grained, zero-trust approach that keeps all safety critical messages encrypted except at the point of consumption. Security topics are established for all mission-critical communication groups, with membership in the topic restricted to “need to know” entities by an attribute-based security policy. The messages in each topic are cryptographically protected with a unique symmetric key known only to valid members of the topic. These keys are dynamically generated by negotiation between the participants and not allocated by a central service for robust distributed security. Message metadata, including the authoring entity, is assured with cryptographic signatures.   Comprehensive Phase 1 Plan: In Phase 1, the following tasks are completed: Analyze the UAM CONOPS for Use Cases, Develop the cryptographic protocols, Develop multi-attribute key distribution/generation, Derive attribute sets appropriate for the UAM CONOPS use cases and develop an engineering plan for prototype evaluation in a SIL. Outstanding Team: SSC has experience with UAM communications, SSC designed and evaluated spectrum efficient technology to improve the capacity, reliability, and robustness of air vehicle data networks under the AFWERX X20.D Agility Prime initiative. The Spectrum Efficient UAV Communication System (SEUAVCS) addresses the communications availability and capacity requirements for Orb/eVTOL/UAM communications, in addition to other critical UAS missions. SSC develop a distributed Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) spectrum management approach solves many of the security issues that are in SRCUMAN. The C4I and Cyber Center at George Mason University is the nation’s first and only civilian university-based entity offering a comprehensive academic and research program in military applications of information technology and cyber security. The GMU team has extensive has been working on a solution for making ADS-B more secure while keeping backwards compatibility since 2014, having published 15 papers in peer reviewed journals and conferences, including two awards (IEEE-AIAA best professional paper award and IEEE-AIAA best paper of the cybersecurity track). This ADS-B solution is applicable to SRCUMAN.