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For decades the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), has been trying to harness the power and rewards of Open Architectures (OA) to achieve flexible weapon systems with low costs of integration and rapid upgrade capabilities. OAs provide a method for rapidly applying cybersecurity to systems as part of standardization updates. Recently, the DoD has directly endorsed OAs as a game-changer for weapon system development and identified clear OA leaders. This sets the stage for a future generation of weapon systems that support rapid integration, modification, and upgrades to enable warfighter capabilities in the field. This paper presents the difference between open architecture and open systems, a short history of OAs in the DoD, discusses how the DoD has renewed its support of OA, and ideas to maintain the momentum.

This chapter presents a novel methodology for detecting logic bombs hidden in unmanned aerial vehicle autopilot code without source code analysis by executing mission runs in a software-in-the-loop simulator and defining safe unmanned aerial vehicle operating areas. The methodology uses preplanned flight paths as a baseline, greatly reducing the input space that must be searched to have confidence that an unmanned aerial vehicle will not encounter a triggering condition during its mission. While the focus is on detecting logic bombs in ArduPilot autopilot software, the methodology is general enough to be applicable to other unmanned aerial vehicle systems.

Hypergame theory has been used to model advantages in decision making. This research provides a formal representation of deception to further extend the hypergame model. In order to extend the model, we propose a hypergame theoretic framework based on temporal logic to model decision making under the potential for trust and deception. Using the temporal hypergame model, the concept of trust is defined within the constraints of the model. With a formal definition of trust in hypergame theory, the concepts of distrust, mistrust, misperception, and deception are then constructed. These formal definitions are then applied to an Attacker-Defender hypergame to show how the deception within the game can be formally modeled; the model is presented. This demonstrates how hypergame theory can be used to model trust, mistrust, misperception, and deception using a formal model.

The rapid pace of technology change necessitates new approaches for upgrading and fielding high assurance mission systems in a timely manner. Furthermore, modern systems are often composed of multiple commercial or third-party components which must be implicitly trusted. We present an approach towards enabling rapid integration of components by employing an open system architecture that is not dependent on a trust relationship between third-party components. Our approach enables a system owner to enforce trust relationships between subsystems while taking advantage of the benefits of an open system architecture. In addition to enforcing trust, our approach allows third-party components to seamlessly interface with each other in an open system without the need to share their proprietary data. We further discuss the application of such an approach in an experimentation event and describe the benefits and limitations of adopting our approach.

As open architecture (OA) standards become increasingly important to the Department of Defense (DoD) and in particular, the United States Air Force (USAF), so too does the need to be able to exercise, experiment, and validate interoperability with these standards. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Sensor Directorate (AFRL/RYWA) has built an architecture and integration event called the Integrated Demonstration and Experimentation Architecture (IDEA) event. IDEA provides a realistic, adaptable government-owned reference architecture with capabilities to measure, control, and document performance benefits (or costs) for potential adopting programs; impacts of technology insertions; and insights into future OA standard growth. The IDEA event included industry and government organizations, that came together to demonstrate advanced integration capabilities in a rapid development environment using OAs, such as Open Mission Systems. The reference architecture includes multiple mission package subsystems and specialized tools for integration. The use of IDEA events to promote the evolution and integration of OA standards to meet current and future program needs will continue. This paper discusses the reference architecture used, the layout of the mission scenario for testing, and how the event was composed.

When dealing with conflicts, game theory and decision theory can be used to model the interactions of the decision-makers. To date, game theory and decision theory have received considerable modeling focus, while hypergame theory has not. A metagame, known as a hypergame, occurs when one player does not know or fully understand all the strategies of a game. Hypergame theory extends the advantages of game theory by allowing a player to outmaneuver an opponent and obtaining a more preferred outcome with a higher utility. The ability to outmaneuver an opponent occurs in the hypergame because the different views (perception or deception) of opponents are captured in the model, through the incorporation of information unknown to other players (misperception or intentional deception). The hypergame model more accurately provides solutions for complex theoretic modeling of conflicts than those modeled by game theory and excels where perception or information differences exist between players. This paper explores the current research in hypergame theory and presents a broad overview of the historical literature on hypergame theory.

The Mission Systems Open Architecture Science and Technology (MOAST) program is an AFRL effort that is developing and demonstrating Open System Architecture (OSA) component prototypes, along with methods and tools, to strategically evolve current OSA standards and technical approaches, promote affordable capability evolution, reduce integration risk, and address emerging challenges [1]. Within the context of open architectures, the program is conducting advanced research and concept development in the following areas: (1) Evolution of standards; (2) Cyber-Resiliency; (3) Emerging Concepts and Technologies; (4) Risk Reduction Studies and Experimentation; and (5) Advanced Technology Demonstrations. Current research includes the development of methods, tools, and techniques to characterize the performance of OMS data interconnection methods for representative mission system applications. Of particular interest are the OMS Critical Abstraction Layer (CAL), the Avionics Service Bus (ASB), and the Bulk Data Transfer interconnects, as well as to develop and demonstrate cybersecurity countermeasures techniques to detect and mitigate cyberattacks against open architecture based mission systems and ensure continued mission operations. Focus is on cybersecurity techniques that augment traditional cybersecurity controls and those currently defined within the Open Mission System and UCI standards. AFRL is also developing code generation tools and simulation tools to support evaluation and experimentation of OSA-compliant implementations.