The U.S. Air Force has tapped SiCore Technologies to support efforts to protect against avionics malware, and SiCore has tapped Charles River Analytics Inc., Charles River says. The two companies are to partner to develop technologies to detect, analyze and mitigate vulnerabilities and attacks on airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions.
Charles River joins the SiCore team as part of the Air Force’s Avionics Vulnerability Assessment, Mitigations and Protections program (AVAMP). The program aims to understand and improve cybersecurity for its platforms and weapons systems.
“We are excited to be working with SiCore Technologies to develop new technologies that will protect ISR missions from cyber attacks,” says Dr. Terry Patten, principal scientist at Charles River Analytics. “We are addressing several important challenges under the AVAMP program, such as assessing the vulnerability of ISR systems, detecting malicious software and firmware, and automatically mitigating the effects of any attacks.
“We are also providing mitigation and protection through our Secure Resilient Operating System, a hypervisor-level OS that uses multi-kernel virtualization to provide isolation, redundancy and resilience,” added Patten. “If one hypervisor fails or is compromised, the other running hypervisors can provide low-overhead fault recovery.”
This is not the first time Charles River has support U.S. military efforts. Previously, the company carried out cyber defense work with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) concerning vulnerability analysis and automatic attack analysis.