CTSi announced that the company has been awarded the US Air Force contract for “Tools to Enable Systematic Testing of Avionics Cyber Security” under the service’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. CTSi will design and demonstrate a software prototype tool that will provide an easy way to instrument the avionics, monitor relevant buses/interfaces, and interact with/fuzz a variety of avionics under test. As part of this effort CTSi will define several fuzzing techniques for use in testing avionics equipment and air platforms cyber vulnerabilities. Those techniques will be evaluated and narrowed down for demonstration as part of this program.
“As the military’s systems become more complex and networked together, the platforms are becoming more and more effective. But, with that power and flexibility comes security risk.” said Tom Sanders, CTSi Managing Director. “We at CTSi are proud to do our part in addressing that risk and making our warfighter’s systems as secure as possible.”
In addition, CTSi will design and develop an effective and intuitive software user interface (UI) to provide the tester the ability to conduct cyber testing quickly and easily. While the Phase I effort was only expected to define requirements for the hardware necessary to fully interact with the avionics, CTSi’s Mudbucket® hardware will be used as the means to support demonstrating the software capability using real avionics.
CTSi will be building upon past SBIR successes, and their innovative intellectual property portfolio, to build these tools quickly and demonstrating the capability on-board aircraft in only a matter of months.