Sciolistes;
Not sure as I have no experience in this but it might be worth looking at
ARINC 653 for some notions of required robustness and 'security'.
The more I consider all this the more I believe that present aircraft are, by virtue of a lot of what has been said particularly in the discussions between
JRBarrett and
Ian W, "safe" from hacking, (you can't "get" to the flight controls through ACARS or an FMS). But I remain agnostic about developing architectures, for example the mentioned-CCS in the B787 design.
In an early post I used the term "corpus callosum" more to conjure a simplistic image of "everything together, cross-pollinating/cross-computing/cross-informing"...a very rough metaphor which will likely send software engineers into fits of eyebrow-raising, as a way of thinking about "centralized computing". I'm trying to think of these systems as they have evolved; the B787 is substantially different than the Airbus architecture I believe and it is future developments that may need closer examination. I can say one thing...after having spent some time googling "CCS" and variously-related topics and examining manufacturers' comments, there is nothing stated in the online "brochures" about security concerning the current themes - it's just all positive, sales-related talk and so there is no information regarding how these systems have been protected. To be fair, many of these sites were dealing with the "B7E7", so we know that hacking (in 2002 - 2005) was not a serious threat or primary threat.
That said, the threats are more serious for developing systems. I raised the notion earlier about the importance of peer-reviewed papers on these topics, this one in particular and, you know, there are almost
none to be found.
I'm sure in unsung corners of this burgeoning field of the software engineering of historical "cartesian controls" (cables-and-pulleys to bits-and-bytes, and as a pilot I say this with admiration and acceptance, not scepticism!), there exists such studies and research but as we have seen in other areas in which technologies must function reliably without single-point-failure in high-risk applications, the robust risk analyses, (
thinking possibilistically . . .) we'd expect are not widely apparent. Why?
PJ2