Digital Plane Safe

Aviation and aerospace have security and safety concerns that are not present nor considered in cloud-based systems for "normal" applications. If the capabilities of cloud-based systems can be extended to aviation scenarios without compromise of safety then this would have many costs, flexibility, and even environmental benefits. Furthermore, it would allow much more dynamicity in the configuration of systems, optimizations through localized and remote data processing and open a path for technologies such as AI to be utilized.

Applying commodity hardware and technologies such as containerization to aviation systems would, for example, bring benefits in the amount of hardware carried, the availability of updates, monitoring etc and all with an impact on the overall power consumption and cooling requirements - which can result into 10-15% fuel savings on commercial aircraft.

To establish the required level of security necessary for the reliable and safe use of cloud platforms we will explore the utilisation of trusted and confidential computing with the associated remote attestation infrastructure along with supply-chain security of hardware and software, and run-time monitoring with digital forensics. Challenges lie not only in safety but some of the basic geographical and computing independence properties of the cloud, and telecommunications latencies and reliability. These will add to the security aspects in ways that this work will identify.