Aviation Security Lab: A testbed for security testing of current and future aviation technologies

Abstract

The continuous development and integration of new technologies in the aviation industry has increased the pool of active systems in use, and thus, the attack surface. The aircraft, as one central element in aviation, have followed the same trend. To accommodate current and future needs of onboard avionics intercommunication, the standard Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet has been created and implemented in several aircraft in recent decades. While this standard suggests security measures for the onboard networks, there may exist potent threat actors which can surpass the measures and pose significant security risks. Therefore, a brief discussion on the type of actors and general threats will be presented. This paper will inform on circumstances which can lead to security breaches, and further report on the simulation of one threat scenario. The environment providing the simulation capabilities is the Aviation Security Lab, a testbed designed for security applications in aviation. The current status of the testing environment is also described towards the end of this paper.