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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2017

Considerations for an Integrated UAS CNS Architecture

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Glenn Research Center (GRC) is investigating revolutionary and advanced universal, reliable, always available, cyber secure and affordable Communication, Navigation, Surveillance (CNS) options for all altitudes of UAS operations. In Spring 2015, NASA issued a Call for Proposals under NASA Research Announcements (NRA) NNH15ZEA001N, Amendment 7 Subtopic 2.4. Boeing was selected to conduct a study with the objective to determine the most promising candidate technologies for Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) air-to-air and air-to-ground data exchange and analyze their suitability in a post-NextGen NAS environment. The overall objectives are to develop UAS CNS requirements and then develop architectures that satisfy the requirements for UAS in both controlled and uncontrolled air space. This contract is funded under NASAs Aeronautics Research Mission Directorates (ARMD) Aviation Operations and Safety Program (AOSP) Safe Autonomous Systems Operations (SASO) project and proposes technologies for the Unmanned Air Systems Traffic Management (UTM) service.There is a need for accommodating large-scale populations of Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) in the national air space. Scale obviously impacts capacity planning for Communication, Navigation, and Surveillance (CNS) technologies. For example, can wireless communications data links provide the necessary capacity for accommodating millions of small UASs (sUAS) nationwide? Does the communications network provide sufficient Internet Protocol (IP) address space to allow air traffic control to securely address both UAS teams as a whole as well as individual UAS within each team? Can navigation and surveillance approaches assure safe route planning and safe separation of vehicles even in crowded skies?Our objective is to identify revolutionary and advanced CNS alternatives supporting UASs operating at all altitudes and in all airspace while accurately navigating in the absence of navigational aids. These CNS alternatives must be reliable, redundant, always available, cyber-secure, and affordable for all types of vehicles including small UAS to large transport category aircraft. The approach will identify CNS technology candidates that can meet the needs of the range of UAS missions to specific air traffic management applications where they will be most beneficial and cost effective.

Templin, Fred L.↗
DOE OSTI2024

National Security Programs - Cyber: MMAREJBLIGE – Modular Multi Agent Grid Emulation for Joined Breakdowns in Linked Generative Emulations - 23-0644

Modular Multi Agent Grid Emulations for Joined Breakdowns in Linked Generative Emulations (MMAREJBLIGE) introduces an agent-based modeling framework into real-time cyber-physical emulation to achieve a context-aware environment that introduces operator/attacker/external-condition variability to improve emulation fidelity and testing rigor. We detail our agent framework design, internal communication via message passing, and time synchronization, as well as the individual components of the system. We include a brief analysis of several scenarios run on a real-time, hardware-in-the-loop, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) test-bed which include normal operation, physical disruption, disruption with mitigation, and disruption with mitigation during a cyber denial-of-service (DOS) attack.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Capability Building Progression of an Insider Threat Mitigation Program at an International Research Reactor

The nuclear industry recognizes the difficulties involved in developing effective managerial and leadership skills in a highly technical and proficient workforce such as that found in nuclear facilities. Implementing an insider threat mitigation program (ITMP) within the nuclear industry is a complex and ongoing process that demands a comprehensive understanding of human behavior, an organization’s security culture, and rigorous regulatory requirements yet also accounts for facility characteristics, physical security, material flow, and activities involving nuclear material. Given the high-consequence nature of research reactor operations, even minor lapses can lead to safety, security, and reputational risks. An effective ITMP requires a defense-in-depth approach that incorporates behavioral analysis, robust vetting procedures, continuous monitoring, and cross-disciplinary coordination. It must also promote a culture of vigilance and accountability at all levels up to and including executive leadership but be flexible enough to adapt to evolving global threats and technological advances. Insider threat mitigation is not a one-time effort but rather a sustained commitment to excellence in safety and security. Establishing a culture in which personnel proactively report incidents and issues that could affect nuclear safety and security is vital to maintaining a safe and secure operational environment. This document was developed to guide senior management and research reactor organizations in creating comprehensive programs to effectively manage and mitigate insider threat behaviors and actions. It focuses on the key pillars of an effective ITMP, including the national legal framework, security culture, preventive and protective measures, cyber security, and performance evaluation. By using a systematic approach during implementation, facilities can foster environments conducive to insider threat detection and support long-term program sustainability. The document also provides strategies for improving communication across all levels of an organization, helping to eliminate barriers that hinder the development of robust ITMPs and enhance overall security culture. In today’s organizations, the concept of leveraging safety and security culture lessons to facilitate knowledge transfer is rapidly evolving to expedite insider threat management and security culture improvements. This document outlines the rationale for evaluating an ITMP based on national customs, culture, and stakeholders. The elements are all germane to reliability and trustworthiness and relate to security concerns that states may encounter. The document focuses not only on individual perceptions regarding security issues and capability building but also on team building and how to resolve concerns. The implementers of a facility’s ITMP may zero in on indicators of insider threats within their enterprise. This material will benefit organizations when it is applied using a systematic and structured approach as demonstrated throughout the document.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗
DOE OSTI2024

Sovereign Credit Rating Processes Adapted to Critical Infrastructure Cyber Risk Assessment

United States critical infrastructure entities are increasingly targeted by motivated and capable threat actors and must be prepared to assess and treat a diverse range of cyber risks. Consequently, this necessitates some form of analytical process to evaluate risks and inform cyber security investment decisions. A potential solution for structuring cyber risk evaluation exists within the field of sovereign credit ratings – where agencies employ mature approaches that integrate quantitative and qualitative data to produce a singular value of assessment. Adapting such approaches, we present a novel criterion and methodology for measuring and communicating the likelihood element of cyber risk. The methodology is composed of three sequential phases: a quantitative baseline organized by distinct capability frames, a bounded qualitative adjustment per frame, and a greater-bounded qualitative adjustment spanning the entire process. The process culminates in publication of a cyber capability rating that communicates a critical infrastructure entity’s ability and willingness to mitigate discontinuous function due to cyberattack.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2025

Artificial Intelligence for (AI) Nuclear Security: Expert Perspectives on AI Priorities for the Office of International Nuclear Security

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform nuclear security operations, offering opportunities to enhance effectiveness while simultaneously introducing new challenges. As AI technologies rapidly evolve, agencies across the United States Government (USG) are researching, implementing, and evaluating various AI models and systems. Given the broad capabilities and applications of these technologies, it is essential for each agency to identify and articulate those areas where it can make meaningful contributions aligned with its mission and expertise. To address this need for strategic focus, in late Fiscal Year 2025 (FY2025), the Office of International Nuclear Security (INS) established an AI Task Force (AITF) to gather input from subject matter experts (SMEs) regarding the most appropriate role INS could serve in researching, evaluating, or implementing AI for nuclear security. The AITF engaged 15 experts from national laboratories with backgrounds in cyber security, physical security, transport security, insider threat mitigation, nuclear engineering, human-systems engineering, and AI/ML development. This white paper summarizes the insights gathered from these SMEs and presents a potential roadmap for INS engagement with AI technologies. The recommendations outlined here are intended to inform INS leadership as they make strategic decisions about resource allocation and program direction in this rapidly evolving technological domain.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

Assessing Energy Infrastructure Devices for Vulnerabilities

Industrial control systems prove to be vital to the health and security of the nation in our critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure includes the most foundational systems to support modern civilization which includes water and wastewater systems, communications, and the electricity we use to name a few sectors. However, these devices' overall composition remains largely unknown and are untested from a cyber security perspective. As part of the Cyber Testing for Resilient Industrial Control Systems (CyTRICS) program, I analyzed one such energy infrastructure device to better understand how it functions, what hardware and software components are present within it, and assess it for security vulnerabilities. To achieve this, I reverse engineered binary files using Ghidra to understand system functionality and learned more about how to collaborate with other researchers on a shared Ghidra project. I learned more about how web sockets function and how to interact with them through Python to test if they are secure or not. This work led me to assess possible vulnerabilities in this device and provide a better understanding of its composition and function, which are essential to INL's mission of securing our nation's energy infrastructure.

99 - GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) Device Cybersecurity Characterization Process and Profile

Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) recognizes that threats in the cyberspace domain continue to grow, which requires CWMD devices and supporting systems to be both cybersecure (ability to protect or defend from cyber-attacks) and resilient (ability to maintain required capability in the face of adversity) to cyber threats. The CWMD cybersecurity characterization approach in this document supports existing cyber resilience activities within the Acquisition Lifecycle Framework. Similarly, this process supports existing Department of Homeland Security Cyber Resilience Test and Evaluation activities, which consist of iterative processes, starting at the initiation of system acquisition and continuing throughout the entire device and system life cycle. Cyber resilience is the ability of an information system to continue to operate while under attack, even if in a degraded or debilitated state,1 and to rapidly recover operational capabilities for essential functions after a successful attack.2 The goal of the security characterization task for CWMD is to support the development of a CBRN device-dependent profile that aligns with device network capabilities and maps to recommended security controls to create a characterization security profile impact levels. The impact levels for CWMD devices should be characterized as Low (L), Moderate (M), High (H) to align with the low, moderate, high control baselines. To estimate the impact levels, the device’s security-related attributes are translated into the security objectives: Confidentiality (C), Integrity (I), and Availability (A), known as the CIA triad. The potential impact for each device can be L, M, H, for devices that connect and transmit different types of data and may have different impact levels. National Institute of Standards and Technology Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 199 states, “the potential impact values assigned to the respective security objectives shall be the highest value from among those security categories that have been determined for each type of information resident on the information system.”3 As CWMD is determining the cybersecurity impact levels of CBRN devices based on network connections and data transfers, the impact levels are aligned with the associated attributes of network connections and communications. For example, if the device system is connected to a wireless network and transmits different data types based on the confidentiality of the data, the highest impact value for each security objective should represent the device’s CIA impact level. This document is intended to be used by test managers, test team, and program managers.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A Survey of Cyber Threats and Security Controls Analysis for Urban Air Mobility Environments

Since the cyber threat landscape changes daily, cybersecurity needs to be an ongoing activity for every organization within the UAM environments. This paper will provide information on identified cyber threats and controls associated with an instance of the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) environment. The MITRE ATT&CK model and framework and the selection of cyber threats and the National Institute of Standards and Technology publications for security control identification and cybersecurity risk identification will be leveraged for analysis.

Cyber Threats↗
DOE OSTI2024

ARCADE (Advanced Reactor Cyber Analysis and Development Environment)

SAND2025-11780O ARCADE (Advanced Reactor Cyber Analysis and Development Environment) software performs cybersecurity experiments on Defensive Cyber Security Architectures (DCSA) for Distributed Control Systems (DCSs). The application is integrated into a cohesive environment that performs cyber risk analyses and reduces costs. ARCADE can investigate the entire cyber-attack surface of a DCS from the physics of control, down to the firmware of individual components with automated efficiency. ARCADE has five major functional components: the Data Broker system, the virtualization environment, the cyber-attack simulator, the cyber-physical analysis system, and the physics simulator. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Valme, Romuald↗
DOE OSTI2025

Deny-by-Default Network Port Security: SPaRC Technical Bulletin #002

Operational Technology (OT) networks [e.g., industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems] have unique cyber security challenges due to their decades long service life, high availability requirements, and limited visibility. OT networks often take credit for being “air gapped” (i.e. disconnected from the Internet) and all devices within the OT network can “talk” to each other—even if they should not. This SPaRC Technical Bulletin describes how the unique limitations of OT networks can become strengths when it comes to cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity↗
NASA NTRS2014

Cyber Threat Assessment of Uplink and Commanding System for Mission Operation

Most of today's Mission Operations Systems (MOS) rely on Ground Data System (GDS) segment to mitigate cyber security risks. Unfortunately, IT security design is done separately from the design of GDS' mission operational capabilities. This incoherent practice leaves many security vulnerabilities in the system without any notice. This paper describes a new way to system engineering MOS, to include cyber threat risk assessments throughout the MOS development cycle, without this, it is impossible to design a dependable and reliable MOS to meet today's rapid changing cyber threat environment.

ground data↗
DOE OSTI2025

An Advanced Cyber-Physical System Security Testbed for Substation Automation

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) testbed serves as a powerful platform for testing and validating cyber intrusion detection and mitigation strategies in substations. This study presents the design and development of a CPS testbed that can effectively assess the real-time dynamics of a substation. Cyber attacks exploiting IEC 61850-based SV and GOOSE protocols are demonstrated using the testbed, along with an analysis on attack detection. Realistic timing measurements are obtained, and the time frames for deploying detection and mitigation strategies are evaluated.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Radio Frequency Spectrum Audit to Inventory Private Cellular Base Station Infrastructure

The ever-changing cellular communication landscape makes it difficult to identify, map, and localize cellular base stations. Localizing cellular base stations provides various advantages, including information security, cybersecurity, spectrum management, and interference detection. For example, the MITRE ATT&CK® (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge architecture) [1] and Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification [2] emphasize the importance of being able to minimize the cyber security threat presented by unregulated private cellular base stations (PCBS). The majority of published research looks at the malicious use of PCBSs and focuses on using data retrieved from user equipment (UE), data obtained from an application on the UE, or data shared between the UE and a mobile network to locate it. This innovative strategy, however, focuses on the passively discovered uniqueness of radio frequency (RF) transmissions from commercial cellular infrastructure received in a designated monitoring position (DMP).

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Field Programmable Gate Array-Based Reactor Protection Systems and Potential for Inclusion of Secure Elements to Improve Cybersecurity

For acceptable implementations of technologies like wireless communications, remote monitoring, etc., strong mitigations must be developed and evaluated to ensure that new attack pathways do not increase risk for Advanced Reactors. Secure Elements can be adopted and adapted for this purpose based on tamper resistance and cryptographic abilities, but research must be done to properly integrate into critical components such as FPGA-based Important to Safety systems in conjunction with current and future regulations on cyber security features in Advanced Reactors. Typically, the integration of a Secure Element happens during the POST and UEFI boot of a computing platform, performed by the Operating System, which is not possible with FPGAs because they do not include these firmware components. Work must be done to identify a reliable and secure method for integration in FPGA-based systems which lack Operating Systems and therefore complex boot procedures, system calls, etc.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Field Programmable Gate Array-Based Reactor Protection Systems and Potential for Inclusion of Secure Elements to Improve Cybersecurity

For acceptable implementations of technologies like wireless communications, remote monitoring, etc., strong mitigations must be developed and evaluated to ensure that new attack pathways do not increase risk for Advanced Reactors. Secure Elements can be adopted and adapted for this purpose based on tamper resistance and cryptographic abilities, but research must be done to properly integrate into critical components such as FPGA-based Important to Safety systems in conjunction with current and future regulations on cyber security features in Advanced Reactors. Typically, the integration of a Secure Element happens during the POST and UEFI boot of a computing platform, performed by the Operating System, which is not possible with FPGAs because they do not include these firmware components. Work must be done to identify a reliable and secure method for integration in FPGA-based systems which lack Operating Systems and therefore complex boot procedures, system calls, etc.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Multilevel Cybersecurity for Photovoltaic Systems

The motivation behind this project is to protect critical infrastructure in electric power generation pertaining to solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. This growing renewable energy resource is becoming a more vital part of the nation’s energy portfolio, particularly since it has achieved grid-parity to existing generation methods in terms of cost. It is thus vital that steps be taken to ensure the cybersecurity of these assets. The project goal was to devise a multilevel cybersecurity solution to address PV security gaps at the inverter and system levels, and field test the solution under the supervision and review of a US-based solar inverter manufacturer and PV installer/operator. A two-level cyberattack defense approach was formulated whereby the first level, the solar inverter level, hardens individual devices and achieves a deeply cyber-secure inverter. The inverter level security involves a multi-layer defense-in-depth approach for securing the inverter while also providing data for the system level algorithms. The second level, the system level, addresses intrusion detection and restoration involving an ensemble of inverters and relevant systems.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗