Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine February 2018 - 4

Feature Article:

DOI. No. 10.1109/MAES.2018.170016

High-Throughput, Cyber-Secure Multiuser
Superposition Covert Avionics System
Yiran Xu, Gang Wang, Sixiao Wei, Intelligent Fusion Technology, Inc., Germantown,
MD, USA
Erik Blasch, Air Force Research Laboratory, Arlington, VA, USA
Khanh Pham, Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base, NM, USA
Genshe Chen, Intelligent Fusion Technology, Inc., Germantown, MD, USA

INTRODUCTION
With the ever-growing attention on advanced cyber threats to aerospace systems, research activities on cyber resiliency have accelerated in both academic and industrial communities. For example,
in mobile wireless devices, machine-to-machine architectures, as
well as broadband transport computing technology, protection and
security are a shared responsibility and liability across both government and commercial sectors [1]. Airborne networks are envisioned as an infrastructure consisting of Internet protocol-based
airborne nodes and onboard platforms that provide interconnectivity between terrestrial and space networks [2]. The airborne
networks will be critical for avionics systems communication,
navigation, display, and control [3]. As a consequence, airborne
systems, as well as satellite communication (SATCOM) systems,
require fast and robust data transfer in a hostile action or adverse
conditions.
In recent literature, considerable research efforts have been devoted to cyber security and data transmission integrity. Adaptive
game theoretic approaches are applied in high-level data fusion
frameworks for asymmetric threat detection and prediction on the
basis of advanced knowledge infrastructure, which can be used for
cyber network defense and situation awareness [4], [5], [6]. Datalevel physical layer cyber security is important when serving multiple user terminals. In [7], [8], the interference from neighboring
terminals is considered. The authors provide solutions for comAuthors' current addresses: Y. Xu, G. Wang, S. Wei, G. Chen,
Intelligent Fusion Technology, Inc., 20271 Goldenrod Lane,
Suite 2066, Germantown, MD 20876, USA. E. Blasch, Air Force
Research Laboratory, Air Force Office of Scientific Research,
Data Science, Program Officer, 875 North Randolph Street,
Arlington, VA 22203, USA, E-mail: (erik.blasch.1@us.af.mil). K.
Pham, Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base,
NM 87117, USA.
Manuscript received January 18, 2017, revised April 26, 2017,
December 10, 2017, and ready for publication December 12,
2017.
Review handled by E. Theunissen.
0885/8985/17/$26.00 © 2018 IEEE
4

pressing the interference to achieve a higher data rate and bit error
rate. Multiple cyber-resilient approaches for military SATCOM and
commercial SATCOM are explored in [9]. The authors introduce
a protection evaluation framework for performing a broad range
of SATCOM adversarial threat analysis and identifying essential
assured communication features. On the basis of the assessment of
the full spectrum of threats to a SATCOM network's space, the protection framework provides a cost-effective, holistic approach to
mitigate threats and to assure effective communication.
A novel solution for SATCOM physical layer cyber security
with intentional and unintentional interference is proposed in [10].
The SATCOM link employing digital video broadcasting-satellite second-generation waveform has been evaluated in various
interference environments in [11]. Channel coding is crucial for
SATCOM interference mitigation, which, however, is not adequate
for protected SATCOM, especially in a wideband radio frequency
(RF) interference environment. The advanced synchronization
scheme and other waveform protection schemes must be jointly
performed with channel coding. A joint traditional cyber security
with RF interference mitigation has been studied in [12] for satellite systems. It provides a cross-layer design with physical layer
channel coding and network layer multipath routing to achieve satellite systems data transmission robustness.
Note that most of the aforementioned works have been done on
the basis of the assumption of the node-to-node data communication. Also, they mainly focused on the threat detection, interference
mitigation, and cyber physical reliability. They failed to consider
the overall throughput or capacity performance within a multiuser
system. Recent analysis suggests a reliable, high-throughput multiuser communication system is lacking, and new technologies are
needed to fill the capacity gap.
In this article, a multiuser superposition covert communication (MuSC) framework is proposed to achieve cyber-resilient,
high-throughput data and information transmission among highly
dynamic network nodes in hostile environments. The MuSC system consists of three parts: watermark for data integrity, waveform
superposition for multiuser access, and interference cancellation
for data recovery. A watermark-based data validation technique
is used to verify the originality of the information [13]. Then, a

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

FEBRUARY 2018



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