On the Security of MIL-STD-1553 Communication Bus

MIL-STD-1553 is a military standard that defines the physical and logical layers, and a command/response time division multiplexing of a communication bus used in military and aerospace avionic platforms for more than 40 years. As a legacy platform, MIL-STD-1553 was designed for high level of fault tolerance while less attention was taken with regard to security. Recent studies already addressed the impact of successful cyber-attacks on aerospace vehicles that are implementing MIL-STD-1553. In this work we present a security analysis of MIL-STD-1553, which enumerates the assets and threats to the communication bus, as well as defines the attacker’s profile.

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