Securing the Skies: Safety and Security in Aviation and Why It Matters

Safety has been at the forefront of civil aviation since the formalization of safe software development standards began in 1981. The aviation industry continued to develop safety standards for hardware and systems design over the next two decades. Soon, aviation found that they were building flying datacenters with increasing connectivity to match. Now that aviation has all this data, processing capability, and global connectivity, how does security fit into aviation? Right alongside safety! In this talk, participants will learn about how Safety and Security is applied to aviation system design and how they interact in non-obvious ways with one another. We'll cover what the real, legal definition of Safety is. You'll learn about acronyms like Design Assurance Levels (DAL) and Security Assurance Levels (SAL) and why they matter. Most importantly, we'll walk through a simple system analysis to show how system safety can be impacted by security threats. We also need to talk about why all of this matters for the general cybersecurity community. Every industrialized sector faces challenges unique to the development of their own specialized systems. These systems may be highly integrated OT networks, weight-restricted computing platforms, or critical networks that cover significant distances. Utilizing a variety of standards and practices from these sectors enables us, the cybersecurity community, an opportunity to adopt new perspectives from other sectors, like aviation.