Warning For Pilots To Counter Airborne Hacking
As the military helicopter lifts off the ground and heads skyward, the numbers on the altimeter suddenly stop ticking upward. The rumble of the helicopter’s engines fades and the chopper starts losing altitude. A second later, a dire warning flashes in red on a cockpit screen: “Cyber Anomaly.”
The helicopter is under attack, but not from missiles or guns. Seconds later, it smashes into the ground. But this pilot is not in a real helicopter, just a small simulator set up in a conference room of a high-rise office building in Virginia.
The pilot is in fact part of a Raytheon team that is building a new warning system it calls CADS (Cyber Anomaly Detection System) that tells pilots when their planes are being hacked, something the US military expects to happen in the battles of the future.
Speaking to DefenseOne, a Raytheon spokesman said, “Basically, we’re trying to give the pilot the information about what’s happening internally on his aircraft in real time.... we’re telling him what’s going on and allowing him to make decisions about what he needs to do to correct the problems.”
Inside most aircraft, important electronics are plugged into a serial data bus. The bus used in many U.S. military planes was developed in the 1970s and “still have not been updated for security,” according to Raytheon.
“You GPS talks on it, your fuel valve switches are on it, your autopilot is on it and other avionics systems all communicate over this bus,” Fry said. “What we found is as technology has increased and more and more [commercial] products are put in aircraft, there’s more of an attack surface for cyber threats to go onto the platform.”
Raytheon began developing this Cyber Anomaly Detection System three years ago after receiving “customer feedback” about “vulnerabilities in aviation platforms,” Raytheon is funding the project itself won’t say if the systems is deployed on U.S. military aircraft.
Pentagon officials have increasingly been talking about weapon cyber vulnerabilities and the need for companies “harden” their products. Hackers can get into military and commercial aircraft, vehicles, and even missiles and bombs by infecting them with malware, by plugging an infected cell phone into one of the aircraft’s USB ports, or even wirelessly.
In the simulation the the helicopterwas injected with malicious code wirelessly from a tablet. The code caused the helicopter’s engines to shut down. While the pilot was able to disable the helicopter’s wireless receiver before hitting the ground, he was not able to stop its fall.
Raytheon says the technology could be used to detect cyber intrusions on drones, vehicles or even missiles and although its product can currently only detect attacks, new versions may be able to fight them off and repair the damage.
“In the future we’re looking more in that direction, but right now we’re starting with a passive system, so we won’t interfere with the bus......We’re just going to leave the human in the loop and leave the pilot in control and make him aware of his surroundings so that he can take the actions.” Raytheon's spokesman said.
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