Toward Rapid Integration in High Assurance Mission Systems

The rapid pace of technology change necessitates new approaches for upgrading and fielding high assurance mission systems in a timely manner. Furthermore, modern systems are often composed of multiple commercial or third-party components which must be implicitly trusted. We present an approach towards enabling rapid integration of components by employing an open system architecture that is not dependent on a trust relationship between third-party components. Our approach enables a system owner to enforce trust relationships between subsystems while taking advantage of the benefits of an open system architecture. In addition to enforcing trust, our approach allows third-party components to seamlessly interface with each other in an open system without the need to share their proprietary data. We further discuss the application of such an approach in an experimentation event and describe the benefits and limitations of adopting our approach.