Cyber safety and security for reduced crew operations (RCO)

Abstract

NASA and the Aviation Industry is looking into "reduced crew operations" (RCO) that would cut today's required two-person flight crews down to a single pilot with support from ground-based crews. Shared responsibility across air and ground personnel will require highly reliable and secure data communication and supporting automation, which will be safety-critical for passenger and cargo aircraft. This paper looks at the different types and degrees of authority delegation given from the air to the ground and the ramifications of each, including the safety and security hazards introduced, the mitigation mechanisms for these hazards, and other demands on an RCO system architecture which would be highly invasive into (almost) all safety-critical avionics. The adjacent fields of unmanned aerial systems and autonomous ground vehicles are viewed to find problems that RCO may face and related aviation accident scenarios are described. The paper explores possible data communication architectures to meet stringent performance and information security (INFOSEC) requirements of RCO. Subsequently, potential challenges for RCO data communication authentication, encryption and non-repudiation are identified. The approach includes a comprehensive safety-hazard analysis of the RCO system to determine top level INFOSEC requirements for RCO and proposes an option for effective RCO implementation. This paper concludes with questioning the economic viability of RCO in light of the expense of overcoming the operational safety and security hazards it would introduce. TABLE OF CONTENTSKey management logistics are the mechanisms to enforce the trust. This includes the creation of keys with their ownership association, key distribution, and revocations. Key management allows only authorized users to have possession of private or secret keys, often only for a set period of time. These cryptographic keys can have an ordinary use (e.g., RCO communications) and an extraordinary use (e.g., a government investigation).

Evaluating the reduced flight deck crew concept using cognitive work analysis and social network analysis: comparing normal and data-link outage scenarios

“…In combination with a ground (aircraft systems' software) mirror the distributed crewing concept can be at least as resilient as current MCO in terms of the network's architecture of possible interactions (Stanton et al 2016a). All concepts for RCO including any type of ground support require a reliable and secure high-bandwidth data-link (Driscoll et al 2017). No data-link can be completely reliable which is why the system has to be designed to withstand disturbances.…”

“…System analysis and design of commercial RCO builds on current MCO in which the FO would be displaced to ground whereas the Captain remains on the flight deck. Retrofitting current aircraft models would not be economically viable because the whole flight deck needs to be equipped with a ground override system (Driscoll et al 2017). Hence, the development of a new aircraft model enables adding novel automation tools to recover from all possible hazardous events on-board of the single-pilot aircraft.…”

“…Hence, we added them on the fifth level of the AH. The basic infrastructures of a (quad-redundant or better) ground override system on-board of the single-piloted aircraft and a data-link via C-band satellite system (Driscoll et al 2017) are inherent in the means-ends links of the AH. The ground override system would have, as partially shown in Fig.…”

“…Hence these links are used for safety critical information such as command and control information, aircraft status reports from air to ground, and sense-and-avoid data of UAVs. Nonetheless, a cryptographic latency problem remains that very high-speed communication with high bandwidth require a special hardware encryption whereas low latencies are difficult to achieve (Driscoll et al 2017). RCO requires this type of data-link with rather low latencies.…”

State of the art of unmanned aircraft transport systems in industry related to risks, vulnerabilities and improvement of safety

“…There is a discussion to reduce crews to single pilot (Driscoll et al 2017). The main reasons humans are still on the flight deck is to manage risks and handle the unexpected or complex situations.…”