wolfSSL exhibited at Xponential last month in Denver. While there, our team met some very kind and knowledgeable talent from “Dark Wolf Solutions” (Shout out, we love the name!)
We discussed with Dark Wolf personnel how the unmanned drone industry is currently in its wild west days and there are many gaps to fill when it comes to cyber security. Given a want for cyber security, there are steep barriers to entry into military and government applications. Many unmanned vehicles are still broadcasting video and telemetry data unencrypted and in the clear for any adversary to pull down off the air waves! We all agree this should be fixed before someone’s drone gets turned against them, or before their expensive drones get bricked by motivated adversaries.
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) is part of the Department of Defense (DoD) and they are helping companies to take that next step turning their commercial technology into useful assets for national defense. One avenue to get from commercial only to defense is called “Blue sUAS” which stands for “small Unmanned Aerial Systems”. One can read more about Blue sUAS here: https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas and other projects available for commercial to DoD in their catalog: https://www.diu.mil/solutions/portfolio/catalog
wolfSSL is now interacting with Dark Wolf who specializes in reviewing drones for submission readiness to the Blue sUAS project. Dark Wolf assists their customers in identifying gaps that need to be addressed before they can pass and be approved for use by the DoD. Disqualifiers are things like “foreign tech” (i.e. chips or other components manufactured outside the US) in addition to insecure comms and data channels. wolfSSL can easily help with the comms and data channels!
wolfSSL is a U.S. based software company that implements NSA Suite B (and soon NSA 2.0 Suite) and NIST approved algorithms in software. Algorithms are all certifiable through the FIPS 140-2 and 140-3 program or NIAP (NSA) for use in CSfC should that be a requirement. The wolfSSL teams’ understanding was that many certifications are not currently a barrier to entry only that the solutions have to be capable of being certified if and when the time comes and that is absolutely the case with all wolfSSL solutions. wolfSSL implements several communication protocols including SSL/TLS up to the latest standards (TLS 1.3 and DTLS 1.3), MQTT (including v5 of the protocol) and SSH (all of these protocols are future-proofed with post-quantum algorithm support!).
wolfSSL offers consulting services and has the engineering-power and know-how to implement any other communication/transport protocols that may be needed or desired for use in UAS. wolfSSL can run on any processor and if a processor is not already supported, the wolfSSL team will add support for it! wolfSSL can encrypt sensitive data at rest in the event a UAS were to be lost on a battlefield and wolfSSL can secure your video, telemetry data, and comms links between the UAS and ground stations!
What is more, wolfSSL will tie into any on-board available hardware cryptography to accelerate performance and security if the software implementations of the algorithms are not yielding the desired performance. A list of existing supported chips is available on our website here: https://www.wolfssl.com/products/wolfcrypt-2/ (just scroll down to “Supported Chipmakers”) Benchmark numbers for various supported chipmakers can be found here: https://www.wolfssl.com/docs/benchmarks/
In summary, if you need Cyber Security solutions as an unmanned drone maker be it a surface maritime, submersible maritime or aerial drone platform, wolfSSL can help. Please contact our team at facts@wolfssl.com to get the conversation started! Also be sure to reach out to Dark Wolf for a review if considering using one of the DIU projects to take your drone from commercial to DoD ready!