Ball Aerospace and SiCore to provide trusted computing and cyber security for military avionics

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB, Ohio –Trusted computing experts at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., are joining those at SiCore Technologies Inc. in Farmingdale, N.Y. in pushing forward with a project to safeguard military avionics, embedded computing, and other weapons systems technologies from computer hackers and other cyber security threats.

Officials of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, announced a $47.9 million contract modification to Ball Aerospace on Wednesday for the Avionics Vulnerability Assessment, Mitigations, and Protections (AVAMP) program.

SiCore also won a $47.9 million contract modification earlier this month for the AVAMP program to investigate and develop methodologies, tools, techniques, and capabilities to identify susceptibilities and mitigate cyber vulnerabilities of military avionics systems.

Ball Aerospace and SiCore won contracts in March 2016 for the first phase of the AVAMP program to focus on embedded computing system cyber security technologies involving vulnerabilities from physical, remote, and supply chain access.

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The program's scope includes manned and remotely piloted vehicles; on-board intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems; munitions; and any equipment, component, or subsystem that could compromise Air Force weapons.

U.S. military avionics cyber security technologies developed in the AVAMP program should be able to interface and interoperate with anti-tamper and open-systems avionics architectures and apply to a wide-range of aircraft that operate in contested environments involving electronic warfare (EW) systems, space systems, and mobile devices.

For this project Air Force researchers want to develop automated tools to support avionics vulnerability assessments; automated reverse engineering, program understanding, and software assurance tools to identify and detect weaknesses in avionics; malware detection tools and countermeasures; and techniques to detect, respond, and adapt to never-before-seen types of cyber attacks.

On these contract modifications Ball Aerospace and SiCore will do the work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and should be finished by March 2023. For more information contact Ball Aerospace online at www.ball.com/aerospace, SiCore Technologies at www.sicore-tech.com, or the Air Force Research Laboratory at www.wpafb.af.mil/afrl.

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