Software is becoming increasingly important for aerospace and defense systems. This is where security comes into play. Indeed, security should be seen as a factor in such systems. A particular concern for secure aerospace software is unauthorized access to (and use of) onboard and external systems (not only by users, but also by other software applications and services, as aerospace systems are essentially “systems of systems”).

Then there are always cyber attacks, which are the bread and butter of defence. For software systems, especially large software systems (hundreds of millions of lines of code), it is not easy (in fact very difficult) to produce “correct” code, let alone “safe” code. Strictly secure software development (and applying good security practices to software development) has always been a concern of major software companies When the systems are large (for example in defence and aerospace) this will be a big problem. This problem involves large-scale software testing, which can take time and cause system delivery delays, which is always a factor when working with large-scale software systems (security makes this process even more difficult).

There is a new set of risks in computing. As a result, the challenge of protecting passengers, flight crew and business partners is rapidly becoming more complex. An IBM study found that it takes up to 6 months to detect a data breach, giving hackers plenty of time to plan a breach.

Identity and access management are at the centre of this risk.