Sital Safe and Secure Cyber Authentication and Wire Fault Detection for MIL-STD-1553, CAN Bus/CAN-FD/ARINC-825-4 and ARINC-429

Most military and civil aircraft, military ground vehicles, cars and spacecraft rely on multidrop data buses for the exchange of information between interconnected systems. Because of this, they’re vulnerable to having their systems “spoofed” or impersonated by rogue nodes or malware software sending malicious messages over data buses. This could result in the failure of critical vehicle systems or in the case of military systems, mission failure. Because of this, there’s a need to perform continuous real time authentication for all received messages.

In addition, data buses are subject to electrical failures, such as intermittent or continuous open or short circuit faults. These faults can be in data bus cables, connectors, couplers, stub cables or connected systems.

Sital’s patented Safe and Secure (SnS) technology provides a unique solution that addresses both of these concerns. For approximately the first four seconds following power-up, Sital Technology’s SnS sensors operate in their Learning mode by monitoring transmissions from all nodes on a data bus and characterizing all nodes physical layers by computing their unique fingerprints (or signatures). Each node’s fingerprint consists of a set of parameters specific to each node’s physical layer characteristics (transmitter, transformer, length of bus cable, etc.)

Following that, the sensors transition into their Monitoring mode. In Monitoring mode, for each message received over the data bus, The SnS sensor compares the received message’s fingerprint parameters with those of the transmitting node’s expected fingerprint. If there’s a mismatch between the received and expected fingerprints, this indicates either a cyber authentication violation or wire fault. Sital’s SnS sensors are able to distinguish between the two and notify host software through its API. In the case of a wire fault, the SnS sensor also identifies the type of fault (open or short circuit) and its approximate location. In either case, it is up to host software to then execute its security playbook and take the appropriate system-level actions.