Cybersecurity and Interoperability of Aviation Safety Service Ecosystem

As the largest high speed mobile network system, the aviation safety service integrated network provides air-to-ground communication to various operators, Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) and airlines across multiple continents. Maintaining such a large network and mobile nodes comes with challenges. Seamless interoperability underpinned by cybersecurity is essential to successful safety service communication. By ensuring that technologies work together across platforms and geographic locations, we better protect the data that flows throughout our aviation systems. And when data is secure, we’re able to confidently extend secure communication to reach aircraft, ANSPs, content providers, airline operation centers, and many more no matter where they receive and send messages across multiple endpoints within an aviation ecosystem across the globe. To provide aviation partners with cutting-edge equipment and to ensure that connected devices and systems meet or surpass security standards, the aviation community needs to be committed to ensuring technologies meet needed security specifications including security standards, the Risk Management Framework (RMF), and compliance to the contemporary security protocols and processes. By performing to these specifications, the aviation community can better enable the system-wide availability and cybersecurity of aviation data, thereby facilitating more timely and effective secure communication. This will require an extensive set of external compliance certifications, attestations to objective evidence of compliance to security regulations (examples include ISO 13485, ISO 14971, ISO 27001/18, SOC2) and product cybersecurity testing certification. This also requires combined cybersecurity testing elements of the established standard for software cybersecurity for network-connectable products, as well as security principles from international standards. This paper discusses the critical components of seamless interoperability underpinned by cybersecurity and related issues for secure data exchanges that ensures the continuum of Internet Protocol Suite (IPS) based safety service communication networks to the aviation safety service ecosystem.