Raytheon
Drs. Brock LaMeres (CpE) and Clem Izurieta (CS) have been working on a project for Raytheon on using hardware diversity to make flight computers resilient to cyber-attacks. This builds on MSU’s prior research on building fault-tolerant computers for NASA. Our research is exploring how to implement redundancy in computer hardware that is functionally equivalent to the user, but diverse at the hardware level.
This approach prevents a cyber-attack from bringing the entire system down since per design, only one computer at a time can ever succumb to the attack while the others will ignore it and continue operation. The MSU team has built a prototype of the concept and presented it at the 2021 RTX Cyber Summit this past summer to nearly 300 Raytheon employees.
They are now working on a more advanced prototype to demonstrate to Raytheon engineers that are working on programs that could benefit from this technology.