Aircraft Security Gateway with Segregated Filtering Nodes
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing network security gateways struggle to provide the required level of cybersecurity, especially in avionics systems, by ensuring secure data transfer between low-trust and high-trust domains while preventing malicious attacks from bypassing filtering functions, which is crucial for aircraft safety.
Innovation Solution
A network security gateway architecture with physically segregated data processing nodes, including a firewall, protocol break, master, and security nodes, connected via bidirectional and unidirectional links, ensuring data flows from low-trust to high-trust domains are filtered through multiple layers, with each node performing specific security functions, and a master node ensuring all flows are filtered before reaching the high-trust domain.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If multiple security filtering functions are implemented in a gateway to prevent malicious attacks, then cybersecurity reliability is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The gateway is divided into multiple independent data processing nodes, each dedicated to a specific security filtering function (firewall, protocol break, intrusion detection, etc.). This segmentation allows each node to be optimized for its specific function while collectively providing comprehensive security, resolving the contradiction between reliability and complexity by making the complex system modular and manageable.
Solution Approach 2:
Each data processing node is designed with specialized hardware and software optimized for its specific security function. For example, the firewall node has dedicated packet filtering capabilities, while the intrusion detection node has specialized signature matching engines. This local optimization ensures high reliability for each function without requiring the entire gateway to be uniformly complex.
2Reliability
If multiple security filtering functions are implemented in series to ensure comprehensive filtering, then cybersecurity reliability is improved, but data flow processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The gateway performs preliminary filtering actions at each node in the series, with early nodes (firewall, protocol break) performing quick rejection of obviously malicious traffic before it reaches subsequent nodes. This preliminary action at each stage prevents unnecessary processing time at later nodes for traffic that should be rejected early, maintaining low latency while ensuring comprehensive security.
Solution Approach 2:
The system allows legitimate traffic to skip through the filtering chain rapidly once it passes initial checks. Traffic that passes the firewall and protocol break nodes without issue can move quickly through the remaining nodes, while only suspicious traffic receives full multi-node inspection. This selective processing reduces average processing time while maintaining security reliability.
Data Source
AI summary
The gateway, which connects a low-trust domain (12) and a high-trust domain (13) of an avionics computing infrastructure, provides a plurality of security functions, each function being performed by a data processing node. The gateway comprises, connected in series along a filtering chain of a data flow received from the low-trust domain: a firewall data processing node (4); a protocol break data processing node (5); a master data processing node (1) and an inverse protocol break data processing node (6), the gateway further including a security data processing node (2) connected to each of the data processing nodes of the filtering chain, the different data processing nodes being physically segregated.