DARPA Program Makes Progress With Aircraft Cyber Security Research

“You have to look at the applications software itself, the control functions, the communications functions, everything that’s running on top of this kernel. One of our partners in the HACMS program, Galois, has developed a new language that allows us to synthesize software that doesn’t have memory vulnerabilities that would be exploitable by an attacker,” said Cofer.

“For example one of the classic security vulnerabilities is a buffer overrun error which allows one function or data to come in and overwrite memory where its not supposed to, and that can be exploited by a hacker. So Galois developed languages that allow us to produce software that doesn’t have these types of memory vulnerabilities. We have used this language to reverse engineer a lot of the functionality on our research platforms, Boeing did the same thing on the unmanned little bird that they flew,” he said, referring to a flight test of the kernel and software that occurred onboard a Boeing Unmanned Little Bird last summer. The Unmanned Little Bird is the unmanned variant of Boeing’s AH-6i manned scout helicopter.