Cyber Resilient Provenance Tracking for Virtual Certification

Abstract

The Virtual Product House (VPH) is an integration and testing center for virtually certifying aircraft components. This is important because developing an aircraft component is costly and time-consuming. If a production team discovers that a component does not meet requirements, the team must repeat the entire design, build, and test process. This repetitive development process is costly and inhibits future innovation. Provenance refers to the origin or history of an artifact, object, or piece of data. In the digital age, provenance has become increasingly important for digital content. While digital artifacts change frequently, provenance records typically do not. In aircraft development, we use provenance to track the development steps of the aircraft, as well as the digital processing workflows. We assume that traceability of aircraft data and reliability of tools and toolchains are both essential for simulation-supported aircraft certification. Based on the requirements of a virtual design process, we have extended the provenance tracking system that we developed for the VPH by applying a digital signature scheme. Our solution is adaptable to emerging security technologies, including post-quantum cryptography. We provide a high-level overview of the proposed system and discuss the design choices behind our approach. Our goal is to demonstrate the architecture, key features, and functionality of our proposed provenance tracking solution for digital aerospace design and certification processes.