A version of this article appears in the May 19 edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology.
With the proliferation of embedded computer systems and connectivity, securing the flight deck from malicious intrusion is an active and growing area of focus in the civil and military sectors.
“Right now, the FAA is very concerned about this,” says John Borghese, vice president of the Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Center. “Where the world is going with more lines of code in any avionics system—we’re talking millions, tens of million lines of code—when combined with more connectivity, cyberthreats are going to continue to be an issue.” Competitor Honeywell has a dedicated team developing strategies to deal with cyberthreats and has begun a vulnerability assessment of its equipment. One area of particular interest is “looking for hidden services and removing them,” the company says. 
Rockwell Collins will conduct a test flight of an H-6U Unmanned Little Bird in late 2016 or early 2017 to verify that new cybersecure software developed for Darpa is immune to hacking. Boeing
Next-generation avionics and cockpits will be designed for cybersecurity from the start, with tools that may come from an ongoing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) program called High Assurance Cyber Military Systems (Hacms). The project has the goal of creating publicly available tools to build software that will measurably protect unmanned vehicle embedded systems from both internal and external cyberthreats. Borghese says the same tools will be “directly applicable” to Rockwell Collins’s civil flight deck business. “Our plan internally is an ability to create these tools so that they’re easily usable for the development of new avionics systems that we can prove are cybersecure,” he says.