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Managing Cyber Risk: from the Ground to the Air and Beyond Out There

Experts from the aerospace sector with the focus of presenting current state-of-the-art in aviation cyber security and discussing major challenges, requirements, and developments. A variety of topics will be addressed by the panel, including: Aviation cyber security regulations, standards, and best practices Aviation information sharing and analysis challenges Aircraft systems and avionics cyber security challenges Airline and airport stakeholder cyber perspectives CNSATM cyber security challenges UAS cyber security and privacy requirements Military aviation cyber security issues in the NAS

Davis, Jerry L.

Anatomy of a Security Operations Center

Many agencies and corporations are either contemplating or in the process of building a cyber Security Operations Center (SOC). Those Agencies that have established SOCs are most likely working on major revisions or enhancements to existing capabilities. As principle developers of the NASA SOC; this Presenters' goals are to provide the GFIRST community with examples of some of the key building blocks of an Agency scale cyber Security Operations Center. This presentation viII include the inputs and outputs, the facilities or shell, as well as the internal components and the processes necessary to maintain the SOC's subsistence - in other words, the anatomy of a SOC. Details to be presented include the SOC architecture and its key components: Tier 1 Call Center, data entry, and incident triage; Tier 2 monitoring, incident handling and tracking; Tier 3 computer forensics, malware analysis, and reverse engineering; Incident Management System; Threat Management System; SOC Portal; Log Aggregation and Security Incident Management (SIM) systems; flow monitoring; IDS; etc. Specific processes and methodologies discussed include Incident States and associated Work Elements; the Incident Management Workflow Process; Cyber Threat Risk Assessment methodology; and Incident Taxonomy. The Evolution of the Cyber Security Operations Center viII be discussed; starting from reactive, to proactive, and finally to proactive. Finally, the resources necessary to establish an Agency scale SOC as well as the lessons learned in the process of standing up a SOC viII be presented.

Wang, John

Cyber Physical Security (CPS) Extension to Air Traffic Management (ATM) Testbed

The Air Traffic Management (ATM) Testbed is being developed at NASA to enable benefit, impact, safety and cost assessments for accelerating the deployment of Concept and Technologies (C&T) in the National Airspace System (NAS). Today, C&T introduction into the NAS takes decades. The primary reason for this is an inability to assess the operational impact of the interaction between the proposed C&T and operationally deployed systems (Realistic Technologies) in terms of NAS-wide safety, traffic flow efficiency, roles and workload of controllers and traffic managers, and impact on airline fleet operations. Transition of C&T to operations requires mathematical modeling and simulation, Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) testing and shadow-mode evaluation driven by operational data. Whereas interaction with the operational system during testing and stages of deployment is not permissible due to safety concerns, it is certainly possible to create a simulation environment that closely mimics the NAS using the same operational systems/hardware for enabling such assessments. This presentation focuses on a proposed Cyber Physical Security extension to the ATM Testbed for creating a modeling and simulation architecture to study how well the Air Traffic Management system will perform and analyze effectiveness of mitigating security measures against particular cyber-attack scenarios.

Datta, Koushik

Cyber Threats & Security Controls Analysis for Urban Air Mobility Environments

Since the cyber threat landscape changes daily, cybersecurity needs to be an ongoing activity for every organization within the UAM environments. This paper will provide information on identified cyber threats and controls associated with an instance of the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) environment. The MITRE ATT&CK model and framework and the selection of cyber threats and the National Institute of Standards and Technology publications for security control identification and cybersecurity risk identification will be leveraged for analysis.

Cyber Threats

FEMP Cybersecurity Arsenal

The FEMP Cyber Security Arsenal is a family of cyber security tools for the federal facility owners and operators. Using these tools, facility owners can evaluate their overall cybersecurity posture. These tools are web-based front-end tools. The tools are meant to help federal owners and operators to evaluate their overall cybersecurity posture. These tools are developed based on the NIST Cybersecurity framework, risk management framework, and DOE C2M2 architectures. Version 3 provides significant updates and features in ten areas

Ashley, Travis [Pacific Northwest National Laborat

Simulation and Modeling Concepts for Secure Airspace Operations

This paper examines cyber security vulnerabilities of Urban Air Mobility operations. With the expected advent of new entrants including Unmanned Aerial Systems, Commercial Launch Vehicles and Urban Air Mobility aircraft, the future United States National Airspace System will have to evolve to include their operations along with the current commercial, general aviation and military operations. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration are working together to provide a vision for aviation operations in the future—2045 and beyond. Their National Airspace System Horizons initiative seeks to provide stakeholders a list of operational scenarios and technologies, concepts and strategies needed for supporting that vision. They have identified cybersecurity as one of the seven strategic interest areas for realizing this vision. Consequently, NASA is studying cyber resiliency for secure airspace operations. While there are many pathways to attack a cyber physical system such as Urban Air Mobility, their effect is expressed in modification or corruption of data/information used for controlling vehicles and making operational decisions. The paper describes cybersecurity technologies of Encryption, Blockchain, Virtual Information Fabric Infrastructure, Trusted Platform Module and Anomaly Detection for protecting the data, and the cyber resiliency of the current and future air traffic management system.

Urban Air Mobility

Simulation and Modeling Concepts for Secure Airspace Operations

This paper examines cyber security vulnerabilities of Urban Air Mobility operations. With the expected advent of new entrants including Unmanned Aerial Systems, Commercial Launch Vehicles and Urban Air Mobility aircraft, the future United States National Airspace System will have to evolve to include their operations along with the current commercial, general aviation and military operations. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration are working together to provide a vision for aviation operations in the future—2045 and beyond. Their National Airspace System Horizons initiative seeks to provide stakeholders a list of operational scenarios and technologies, concepts and strategies needed for supporting that vision. They have identified cybersecurity as one of the seven strategic interest areas for realizing this vision. Consequently, NASA is studying cyber resiliency for secure airspace operations. While there are many pathways to attack a cyber physical system such as Urban Air Mobility, their effect is expressed in modification or corruption of data/information used for controlling vehicles and making operational decisions. The paper describes cybersecurity technologies of Encryption, Blockchain, Virtual Information Fabric Infrastructure, Trusted Platform Module and Anomaly Detection for protecting the data, and the cyber resiliency of the current and future air traffic management system.

Urban Air Mobility

Hyper Spectral Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a common machine learning (ML) task with growing importance in the fields of imaging, quality assurance, and multiple security related disciplines. Anomaly detection is more difficult than traditional machine learning methods due to the inherent unlabeled nature of the datasets. Existing anomaly detection architectures commonly face challenges with explainability, retaining information related to the relational structure of the data, and false positive rates. Hyperspectral Imaging Anomaly Detection (HSI) is a statistical model that employs vertex and edge weighted graphs to preserve the data’s relationships on different topographical scales. The model is able to generalize from anomaly detection in 2D images to novel datasets related to cyber-security. Furthermore, the use of multi-spectral and other filtering methods results in fewer false positives and increases the explainability of model predictions. When applying HSI to cyber-security datasets, we are able to successfully detect malicious activity with a relatively high degree of accuracy.

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

The Spaceport Command and Control System Security Assessor Project

This Summer, I worked as a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Internships and Fellowships (NIF) intern under my mentor, Jill Giles within the Software Engineering Branch. Within this project, I worked alongside the Cyber Security branch to identify a list of Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) software to analyze, research, and gain insight about potential vulnerabilities within the software that could become a threat of attack. After identifying the list of COTS software, my team and I used Microsoft Excel to create a worksheet to easily organize and design a questionnaire about the software. Security reports weregiven to us to identify the software used on the machines in the firing rooms. With these reports, we created a script that would populate the database with the software information to identify potential security weaknesses of COTS software.The goal of the project was to produce a final report, summarizing the most vulnerable launch control system servers and configurations and document vulnerabilities, residual risk, likelihood, and consequence. This project is important for the Cyber Security and Information Technology branches because it will identify security weaknesses and help to mitigate risk. From the Spaceport Command and Control System Security Assessor Project, I learned how to properly identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities within software and how to mitigate the risks within the software. This project also taught me how to create databases using scripts and input files.

Destani Satora Van Arsdalen

Building Cybersecurity Educational Materials for Students: The Windfarm Capture-The-Flag Exercise

Securing and protecting critical infrastructure in an increasingly digital world is vital but it is all too often an afterthought. It is especially important that students become aware of internet safety and security at an early age. However, the availability of interactive and educational cybersecurity material targeted toward students is minimal in the United States. Here we show an example of interactive cyber security educational material that an educator can use in their classroom to encourage students to think about the interaction between real-world physical objects, cyber security, and information security. By putting together a “capture-the-flag” exercise, students can see in real time how hackers and cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities and gain access information. The students try to “capture” the “flag” (i.e., information) in the wind farm by looking for oddities in the code or by taking advantage of weaknesses in everyday protocols. Students can also see how cybersecurity interacts with the power grid through the wind farm project scenario and how a hacker could cause serious problems to a critical infrastructure sector. Our goal for the project is getting students interested in cybersecurity and help them develop an awareness of how important having robust security systems is. We also hope that this project demonstrates the importance of introducing these concepts early and inspires others to create similar projects geared toward students.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

IT Security Support for the Spaceport Command Control System Development

My job title is IT Security support for the Spaceport Command & Control System Development. As a cyber‐security analyst it is my job to ensure NASA's information stays safe from cyber threats, such as, viruses, malware and denial-of-service attacks by establishing and enforcing system access controls. Security is very important in the world of technology and it is used everywhere from personal computers to giant networks ran by Government agencies worldwide. Without constant monitoring analysis, businesses, public organizations and government agencies are vulnerable to potential harmful infiltration of their computer information system. It is my responsibility to ensure authorized access by examining improper access, reporting violations, revoke access, monitor information request by new programming and recommend improvements. My department oversees the Launch Control System and networks. An audit will be conducted for the LCS based on compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I recently finished analyzing the SANS top 20 critical controls to give cost effective recommendations on various software and hardware products for compliance. Upon my completion of this internship, I will have successfully completed my duties as well as gain knowledge that will be helpful to my career in the future as a Cyber Security Analyst.

IT Security

Cybersecurity for the Operational Technology Environment (CyOTE) (Final Technical Report)

Electric grids have historically been susceptible to both physical attacks and environmental hazards but the implementation of smart grids, remote management, and self-healing networks, has now made the grid vulnerable to cyber attacks. To address risks introduced by routable connectivity, utilities must establish dynamic solutions to identify, protect, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber security threats and vulnerabilities. In response to the evolving threat landscape U.S. Department of Energy-Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (DOE CESER) initiated the Cybersecurity for the OT Environment (CyOTE) pilot program, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) effort designed to leverage U.S. intelligence capabilities to prevent, detect, or mitigate a cyber attack on utility operational technology (OT) networks. As part of the CyOTE pilot, The Southern Company (Southern Company or Southern) researched, evaluated and deployed emerging Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) technologies and cyber security monitoring architectures to provide previously unrealized network visibility and situational awareness through deep packet inspection and data analytics. This Final Scientific/Technical Report documents the objectives, methodology, lessons learned, and results of Southern Company’s participation in the CyOTE pilot from December 2018 to September 2023.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION

Towards Reliable Evaluation of Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection Performance

This report describes the results of research into the effects of environment-induced noise on the evaluation process for anomaly detectors in the cyber security domain. This research was conducted during a 10-week summer internship program from the 19th of August, 2012 to the 23rd of August, 2012 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The research performed lies within the larger context of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Smart Grid cyber security project, a Department of Energy (DoE) funded effort involving the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California/ Information Sciences Institute. The results of the present effort constitute an important contribution towards building more rigorous evaluation paradigms for anomaly-based intrusion detectors in complex cyber physical systems such as the Smart Grid. Anomaly detection is a key strategy for cyber intrusion detection and operates by identifying deviations from profiles of nominal behavior and are thus conceptually appealing for detecting "novel" attacks. Evaluating the performance of such a detector requires assessing: (a) how well it captures the model of nominal behavior, and (b) how well it detects attacks (deviations from normality). Current evaluation methods produce results that give insufficient insight into the operation of a detector, inevitably resulting in a significantly poor characterization of a detectors performance. In this work, we first describe a preliminary taxonomy of key evaluation constructs that are necessary for establishing rigor in the evaluation regime of an anomaly detector. We then focus on clarifying the impact of the operational environment on the manifestation of attacks in monitored data. We show how dynamic and evolving environments can introduce high variability into the data stream perturbing detector performance. Prior research has focused on understanding the impact of this variability in training data for anomaly detectors, but has ignored variability in the attack signal that will necessarily affect the evaluation results for such detectors. We posit that current evaluation strategies implicitly assume that attacks always manifest in a stable manner; we show that this assumption is wrong. We describe a simple experiment to demonstrate the effects of environmental noise on the manifestation of attacks in data and introduce the notion of attack manifestation stability. Finally, we argue that conclusions about detector performance will be unreliable and incomplete if the stability of attack manifestation is not accounted for in the evaluation strategy.

cyber defense

Reliable and Secure Surveillance, Communications and Navigation (RSCAN) for Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) in Controlled Airspace

The aviation industry faces a rapidly-emerging need for integrating Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) into the national airspace (NAS). This trend will present challenging questions for the safe operation of UAS in controlled and uncontrolled airspaces based on new Communications, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) technologies. For example, can wireless communications data links provide the necessary capacity for accommodating ever increasing numbers of UAS worldwide? Does the communications network provide ample Internet Protocol (IP) address space to allow Air Traffic Control (ATC) to securely address each UAS? Can navigation and surveillance approaches assure safe route planning and safe separation of vehicles even in crowded skies?Under NASA contract NNA16BD84C, Boeing is developing an integrated CNS architecture to enable UAS operations in the NAS. Revolutionary and advanced CNS alternatives are needed to support UAS operations at all altitudes and in all airspaces, including both controlled and uncontrolled. These CNS alternatives must be reliable, redundant, always available, cyber-secure, and affordable for all types of vehicles including small UAS to large transport category aircraft. Our approach considers CNS requirements that address the range of UAS missions where they will be most beneficial and cost-effective.A cybersecure future UAS CNS architecture is needed to support the NASA vision for an Unmanned Air Traffic Management (UTM) system in uncontrolled airspace and a cooperative operation of manned and unmanned aircraft in the controlled global Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. The architecture must, therefore, support always-available and cyber secure operations. This paper presents UAS CNS architecture concepts for large UAS operating in the ATM system in controlled airspace. Future companion works will consider small UAS operating in the UTM system in uncontrolled airspace.

Ponchak, Denise S.

Considerations for an Integrated UAS CNS Architecture

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Glenn Research Center (GRC) is investigating revolutionary and advanced universal, reliable, always available, cyber secure and affordable Communication, Navigation, Surveillance (CNS) options for all altitudes of UAS operations. In Spring 2015, NASA issued a Call for Proposals under NASA Research Announcements (NRA) NNH15ZEA001N, Amendment 7 Subtopic 2.4. Boeing was selected to conduct a study with the objective to determine the most promising candidate technologies for Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) air-to-air and air-to-ground data exchange and analyze their suitability in a post-NextGen NAS environment. The overall objectives are to develop UAS CNS requirements and then develop architectures that satisfy the requirements for UAS in both controlled and uncontrolled air space. This contract is funded under NASAs Aeronautics Research Mission Directorates (ARMD) Aviation Operations and Safety Program (AOSP) Safe Autonomous Systems Operations (SASO) project and proposes technologies for the Unmanned Air Systems Traffic Management (UTM) service.There is a need for accommodating large-scale populations of Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) in the national air space. Scale obviously impacts capacity planning for Communication, Navitation, and Surveillance (CNS) technologies. For example, can wireless communications data links provide the necessary capacity for accommodating millions of small UASs (sUAS) nationwide? Does the communications network provide sufficient Internet Protocol (IP) address space to allow air traffic control to securely address both UAS teams as a whole as well as individual UAS within each team? Can navigation and surveillance approaches assure safe route planning and safe separation of vehicles even in crowded skies?Our objective is to identify revolutionary and advanced CNS alternatives supporting UASs operating at all altitudes and in all airspace while accurately navigating in the absence of navigational aids. These CNS alternatives must be reliable, redundant, always available, cyber-secure, and affordable for all types of vehicles including small UAS to large transport category aircraft. The approach will identify CNS technology candidates that can meet the needs of the range of UAS missions to specific air traffic management applications where they will be most beneficial and cost effective.

Templin, Fred L.

Considerations for an Integrated UAS CNS Architecture

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Glenn Research Center (GRC) is investigating revolutionary and advanced universal, reliable, always available, cyber secure and affordable Communication, Navigation, Surveillance (CNS) options for all altitudes of UAS operations. In Spring 2015, NASA issued a Call for Proposals under NASA Research Announcements (NRA) NNH15ZEA001N, Amendment 7 Subtopic 2.4. Boeing was selected to conduct a study with the objective to determine the most promising candidate technologies for Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) air-to-air and air-to-ground data exchange and analyze their suitability in a post-NextGen NAS environment. The overall objectives are to develop UAS CNS requirements and then develop architectures that satisfy the requirements for UAS in both controlled and uncontrolled air space. This contract is funded under NASAs Aeronautics Research Mission Directorates (ARMD) Aviation Operations and Safety Program (AOSP) Safe Autonomous Systems Operations (SASO) project and proposes technologies for the Unmanned Air Systems Traffic Management (UTM) service.There is a need for accommodating large-scale populations of Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) in the national air space. Scale obviously impacts capacity planning for Communication, Navigation, and Surveillance (CNS) technologies. For example, can wireless communications data links provide the necessary capacity for accommodating millions of small UASs (sUAS) nationwide? Does the communications network provide sufficient Internet Protocol (IP) address space to allow air traffic control to securely address both UAS teams as a whole as well as individual UAS within each team? Can navigation and surveillance approaches assure safe route planning and safe separation of vehicles even in crowded skies?Our objective is to identify revolutionary and advanced CNS alternatives supporting UASs operating at all altitudes and in all airspace while accurately navigating in the absence of navigational aids. These CNS alternatives must be reliable, redundant, always available, cyber-secure, and affordable for all types of vehicles including small UAS to large transport category aircraft. The approach will identify CNS technology candidates that can meet the needs of the range of UAS missions to specific air traffic management applications where they will be most beneficial and cost effective.

Templin, Fred L.

National Security Programs - Cyber: MMAREJBLIGE – Modular Multi Agent Grid Emulation for Joined Breakdowns in Linked Generative Emulations - 23-0644

Modular Multi Agent Grid Emulations for Joined Breakdowns in Linked Generative Emulations (MMAREJBLIGE) introduces an agent-based modeling framework into real-time cyber-physical emulation to achieve a context-aware environment that introduces operator/attacker/external-condition variability to improve emulation fidelity and testing rigor. We detail our agent framework design, internal communication via message passing, and time synchronization, as well as the individual components of the system. We include a brief analysis of several scenarios run on a real-time, hardware-in-the-loop, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) test-bed which include normal operation, physical disruption, disruption with mitigation, and disruption with mitigation during a cyber denial-of-service (DOS) attack.

42 ENGINEERING