Remote Attestation for High Assurance ATM Communications Through Commercial Networks

Traditionally, the solution to guarantee secure and reliable communications for critical sectors such as finance, government, and transportation has been to rely upon dedicated networks. These infrastructures offer strict controls, customized security, and guaranteed performance but they usually face scalability limitations, while modern services require increased rates of exchanged data. On the other hand, commercial networks such as broadband internet, mobile data, and commercial SATCOM, provide cost-effectiveness, flexibility, high bandwidth, and high scalability. Leveraging commercial networks for highassurance communications requires, among other risk mitigation measures, robust cyber security to mitigate unauthorized access and data integrity threats impact. This research proposes Remote Attestation (RA) as a solution to continuously and dynamically monitor and assess the trustworthiness of end-points in highassurance communications routed over commercial networks. The study is applied to a use case from the Future Connectivity and Digital Infrastructure (FCDI) project, funded by the European Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) program, which aims to enhance current Air Traffic Management (ATM) boosting air-to-ground communication capabilities by exploiting existing commercial data-links. In the context of that use case, this work proposes an RA approach to provide strong security guarantees on the endpoints involved in establishing the secure communication channel. The use case is analyzed to extract threats and minimum security requirements, which are then satisfied on a prototype implementation presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. The results highlight the potential of RA to enhance the security and reliability of critical communications over commercial networks, offering insights into future research directions.