Securing Data in Motion from Shop Floor Machines into Digital Engineering Platforms

Today, the Air Force Sustainment Center (AFSC) utilizes a plethora of machines on the shop floor for inspection, maintenance and monitoring.  These machines, such as Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI) equipment, offer valuable data and insights crucial for a complete digital engineering thread, including eddy current, ultra-sonic, radiography, and penetrant measurements and more.  AFSC cannot securely connect these untrusted machines to AF networks in order to transfer the data that they compile and collect into Digital Engineering (DE) platforms.  The shop floor machines are often produced via questionable supply chains and certainly have not been designed with cybersecurity in mind.  The workaround that depot-level operators use today is often photography, screenshots, note-taking, and other manual, ad-hoc means to retrieve and move the data.  These manual mechanisms do not provide consistent, repeatable, reliable, trustworthy data flows necessary for a complete digital thread. These inefficient, incomplete workflows for leveraging data from shop floor machines adds to delayed delivery of warfighting capabilities for depots, presents operating burdens, and ultimately drives up costs. Corsha has a dual-use API Security Platform that can securely and efficiently help connect these untrusted shop floor inspection machines into the DE systems across disjoin networks.  To date, Corsha has tailored its technology towards service-to-service connections but through this SBIR Direct-to-Phase-II work, will adapt its Authentication technology into hardware and software-based Connectors for these shop floor machines.  This SBIR work if funded will enable the tying of currently disjoint digital threads for AFSC and empower enable Airmen and operators to efficiently collect, trust and act on shop floor machine data used to service and sustain the AF fleet.