Providing Mission Assurance for Airborne Networks

Detecting, assessing, and understanding the impact of cyber events on mission systems and tasks is critical for assuring mission success for airborne and enclave networks. As the throughput of air-ground data links continues to increase and the network services accessible to airborne platforms and enclave networks grows, threats become capable of causing more extensive disruptions. This is especially true for airborne missions, where little detection and assessment capability is present. Traditional solutions are not optimal for airborne or enclaved environments because of their constrained throughput, intermittent connectivity, limited coordination of mission-specific details, and the lack of accessibility to centralized cyber event correlation. This paper describes an approach and tool developed to overcome these issues on airborne networks while providing efficient collection and mission impact estimation for the United States Air Force.