DOD UAVs Must Be Secure

A defense contractor asked High Assurance Systems for a confidential trade study of security operating systems for its U.S. Air Force-sponsored unmanned aircraft required to process classified information.

A mid-size U.S. defense contractor was building an unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV) with exceptional properties, including the ability to support multiple simultaneous intelligence missions and with strike capability to deliver precision munitions to support the warfighter. The UAV would use and gather highly classified data, so high security and high assurance were both long-term requirements.

Our customer asked High Assurance Systems to conduct a trade study of modern security operating systems that use a separation kernel to implement strict separation among multiple co-resident applications processing data from different security domains, control of information flow among domains, and fault isolation. The study helped educate our customer and its defense customer on separation kernel concepts, their evaluation by the NSA, hardware considerations, and life cycle cost implications. The products of the U.S. separation kernel vendors were assessed through a 200-question survey. Conclusions supported the use of a separation kernel for the UAV and provided guidance for a selection process and for evaluation by the relevant certification authorities. A four-page reference list, annotated to guide further study, completed the report.

“With its deep background in security and safety partitioning operating systems, High Assurance Systems delivered a deeply-informed study of over 100 pages at very low cost and on a very short schedule. Our customer was pleased.” - Chief Engineer

OUSD(AT&L) UAS Control Segment Working Group

OUSD(AT&L) wants to slash cost and development time for all future DOD unmanned aircraft vehicle base stations. High Assurance Systems is helping by leading the infrastructure services task group to define the platform for a new reference architecture.

The U.S. Department of Defense wants to slash development time and cost, acquisition cost, and operating cost for future unmanned aircraft vehicle "control segments" (base stations). Under direction from the OUSD(AT&L) Acquisition Decision Memorandum, 11 February 2009, the UAS Task Force chartered the UCS Working Group to develop and demonstrate a common, open, and scalable UAS "reference architecture" supporting UAS Groups 2-5 (from 21 lbs to greater than 1,320 lbs).

UCSWG is a multi-year effort organized as a U.S. open technical society with approximately 150 active participants from 40 companies and U.S. Government agencies, including industry and government representatives from all current DOD UAS programs of record, emerging UAS programs, and small businesses.

High Assurance Systems was selected to lead the Infrastructure Services Task Group, responsible for defining all platform services for use by UAS applications, and to represent the UCSWG to NSA.

For further information, see the UCSWG public website at https://ucsarchitecture.org/.