Supervisor

Suitable for

Abstract

Co-supervised by Systems Security lab

Core Flight System (cFS) is an open-source satellite operating system provided by NASA, providing a standard interface and set of applications which can run on a variety of hardware platforms thanks to its abstraction of the underlying operating systems. Applications and devices within cFS communicate using a publish-subscribe model on a shared bus interface. These messages are not logged or authenticated so a malicious component could affect parts of the satellite it should not have access to.

In this project a student would design and implement a security layer over the cFS software bus to provide security monitoring and per-application access control. Such a system would ideally be backwards-compatible with existing cFS applications.

Students undertaking this project should be comfortable writing in C.

Useful links: - NASA Core Flight System: https://github.com/nasa/cFS