SAnToS Researchers Funded by Rockwell Collins for Security Certification
Rockwell Collins is a leading manufacturer of avionics and communications solutions, both for commercial aviation and the military. Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Center is Rockwell Collins’ research and development center and supports the company by developing, acquiring, and transitioning technology into our product groups. Many Rockwell Collins product groups are currently developing products, or expect soon to develop products, that communicate with more than one security domain. Rockwell Collins markets products in a broad range of markets of interest to the DoD and U.S. Air Force, including communication, avionics, navigation systems, and displays offerings. The need to process information from diverse security domains with Multiple Levels of Security (MLS) is an increasingly common requirement across many of Rockwell Collins' diverse military businesses.
RC ATC engineers lead by Dr. Matthew Wilding have established themselves as industry leaders in the area of certification of systems built according to the Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) architecture. The MILS program, primarily funded through NSA and AFRL, proposes to make development, accreditation, and deployment of MLS-capable systems more practical, achievable, and affordable by providing a certified infrastructure foundation for systems that require assured information sharing. MILS systems are developed on top of a Separation Kernel that isolates and controls communication between application components deployed in different partitions of the kernel. MILS middleware provides various services such as a Partitioning Communication System (PCS) which extends the single-node security-policy enforcement provided by the Separation Kernel to a distributed environment, and high-assurance network guards (HAG) that validate that data passing between MILS components is authorized. The MILS program aims to establish a commercial market for high-assurance standards-based COTS components that can be assembled to produce NSA-accredited systems.
"SAnToS researchers have a great reputation for developing powerful formal methods tools that can be applied to real-world problems", said Dr. Wilding. "Rockwell Collins ATC has sought out and funded Kansas State as a research partner based on Kansas State's expertise in static analysis that we believe can be applied to automate and scale-up portions of our verification processes."
RC ATC engineer David Greve has played a key role in developing RC ATC's security verification infrastructure. "We're very happy with the early results we are getting with the Kansas State team", said Greve. "What we are finding is that many elements of our verification framework can be automated using SAnToS technology. Over the long term, we believe these techniques are going to lead to a dramatic reduction in effort, decreased time required to certify, and a greater ability to handle more complex systems that place a much greater emphasis on concurrency and heap-allocated data."