Collaborative Cybersecurity Framework for CNS
Valerio Senni, Davide Martintoni, Laurent Léonardon, Timo Warns, Cristian Bertoldi · 2025
The ever-evolving cybersecurity threat landscape and an increasing threat exposure require a transition to over-arching and harmonized security approaches for future Communication, Navigation, and Surveillance (CNS) systems. Such approaches are essential for end-to-end and interoperable secu-rity measures being prerequisites for the protection of aviation's digital infrastructures. While CNS stakeholders have in place dif-ferent cybersecurity risk management processes and mitigation practices, they often run independently from each other with limited coordination. This paper presents a cybersecurity frame-work, under development within the Future Communications Digital Infrastructure (FCDI) project of the SESAR JU program, to support CNS stakeholders in collaboratively identifying cyber-security threats, defining an end-to-end cybersecurity posture, and refining the identified threats and security objectives per stakeholder scope of responsibility. By the proposed framework, collaborative threat elicitation, which is based on well-established threat modeling methodologies, yields a threat model serving as a cross-stakeholder coordinating artifact as well as an input for supporting each stakeholder's cybersecurity process. Similarly, mitigation is driven by a collaborative approach, fostering the adoption of Zero Trust principles within and across stakeholders' scope of responsibilities.