Techniques to Maximize O-Level Cyber Security Protection
Jon Semancik, Adam Wells · 2023
Cyber security threats continue to grow on a daily basis with attacks coming from a wide range of sources including phishing, spear phishing, malware, ransomware, exploiting cloud vulnerabilities, Botnet, state-sponsored attacks, as well as others. Of the aforementioned, state-sponsored attacks not only pose a significant threat to western financial, educational and healthcare institutions, but also threaten the systems and data utilized by a wide range of government agencies and contractors. The military test community is not immune to these threats either with many currently deployed automatic test equipment (ATE) implementations, across the various maintenance levels from the flightline to the depot, being increasingly vulnerable. A growing number of Organizational Level (O-Level) test sets are now exposed to cyber threats as their architectures and interfaces continue to evolve to meet the ever-growing need for increased processing power and measurement performance. Further, O-Level test sets typically connect to the platform (i.e. aircraft) and as such, pose a much greater cyber-security threat. Physical threats have always existed, even for previous generations of test sets, but the nature of the vulnerabilities has largely shifted to new types of interfaces. Replacing legacy test sets, that were deployed with limited external connectivity and data storage capabilities, with advanced processor-based implementations exposes them to a new set of cyber security concerns including possible vulnerabilities with the operating system, the test development environment, the test executive (sequencer) as well as threats from other new interfaces that could possibly be exploited. This paper will delve into these and other possible vulnerabilities with modern O-Level test set implementations, including the impact from the underlying hardware and software architectures. It will discuss the Department of Defense (DOD) Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for devices and systems and identify where the STIG requirements apply to O-Level test sets. The analysis will include aspects such as file protections, access control, data encryption, activity logs, user group accounts and privileges, test program set (TPS) event logging and others. The analysis will also cover cyber security benefits from utilizing a cyber-approved integrated test development and test executive environment, and identify techniques to maximize the proper protections for current and future deployments.