Secure architecture for information systems in avionics

Traditionally, software in avionics has been totally separated from open-world software in order to avoid any interaction that could corrupt critical on-board systems. However, new aircraft generations need more interaction with off-board systems to offer extended services, which makes these information flows potentially dangerous. In a previous work, we have proposed the use of virtualization to ensure dependability of critical applications despite bidirectional communication between critical on-board systems and untrusted off-board systems. A comparison mechanism based on execution traces analysis is used to detect discrepancies between replicas supported by diverse virtual machines. We propose to strengthen the comparison mechanism at runtime by the use of an execution model, derived from a static analysis of the java bytecode. Keywords-avionic information system; dependability; security; execution model; virtualization;