Steal This Drone: High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems
Darren Cofer presents outcomes from DARPA's HACMS program, building provably secure military drone flight control software using seL4 microkernels and formal verification.
Summary
The Vulnerability of Military Embedded Systems
Unmanned military platforms and autonomous drones traditionally suffer from memory corruption and architectural vulnerabilities that expose flight controls to remote hijacking.
DARPA High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS)
Darren Cofer details Collins Aerospace's leadership in the DARPA HACMS program, developing mathematically verified software and architectures for autonomous aircraft.
Leveraging seL4 Microkernels and Formal Verification
The team utilized the formally verified seL4 microkernel and AADL architecture models, mathematically proving the impossibility of buffer overflows and thread deadlocks.
Red Team Penetration Testing Validation
Cofer recounts extensive adversarial red teaming where elite offensive teams were granted root access to non-critical partitions but were unable to compromise flight controls.
Related talks
Aerospace Village·26 min
Jason Whelan
Jason Whelan presents custom Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) for UAVs, detecting real-time GPS spoofing, signal jamming, and unauthorized telecommands.
BalCCon - Balkan Computer Congress·47 min
Nemanja Stefanovic
Investigates balCCon2k15 - Nemanja Stefanovic - Practical use of drones in everyday life and evaluates key implications for security practitioners.
Black Hat·36 min
Jason Raber
Presenters detail vulnerability discovery and exploitation in USA 2013 - Virtual Deobfuscator - a DARPA Cyber Fast Track funded effort.