Cybersecurity Engineering: Bridging the Security Gaps in Avionics Architectures and DO-326A/ED-202A

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility is envisioned as an on-demand, highly automated and autonomous air transportation modality. It requires the use of advanced sensing and data communication technologies to gather, process, and share flight-critical data. Where this sharing of mix-critical data brings opportunities, if compromised, presents serious cybersecurity threats and safety risks due to the cyber-physical nature of the airborne vehicles. Therefore the avionics system design approach of adhering to functional safety standards (DO-178C) alone is inadequate to protect the mission-critical avionics functions from cyber-attacks. To approach this challenge, the DO-326A/ED-202A standard provides a baseline to effectively manage cybersecurity risks and to ensure the airworthiness of airborne systems. In this regard, this paper pursues a holistic cybersecurity engineering and bridges the security gap by mapping the DO-326A/ED-202A system security risk assessment activities to the Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment process. It introduces Resilient Avionics Architecture as an experimental use case for Urban Air Mobility by apprehending the DO-326A/ED-202A standard guidelines. It also presents a comprehensive system security risk assessment of the use case and derives appropriate risk mitigation strategies. The presented work facilitates avionics system designers to identify, assess, protect, and manage the cybersecurity risks across the avionics system life cycle.