Aviation has a concept called the Iron Bird: a ground-based, full-scale mock-up of an aircraft's systems, used to test how everything works together before any of it leaves the ground. It is where you find the problems that are expensive to find in the air. We borrowed the idea for cybersecurity and built the Iron Rodent.
Start with the MOUSE
The Iron Rodent is the cybersecurity counterpart to that aviation Iron Bird, and it is built around our MOUSE. MOUSE stands for Mobile Optical Ultrasonic Sensor Explorer, a prototype small unmanned aircraft system designed for missions that range from intelligence gathering to scientific data collection. Per FAA standards, a sUAS weighs less than 55 pounds at takeoff.
We use the MOUSE as a training platform for a practical reason: real aerospace platforms come with intellectual property constraints that limit what we can show and discuss. The MOUSE lets us teach the same lessons in the open.
What the Iron Rodent tests
The Iron Rodent is a dedicated testbench for evaluating the security of the MOUSE's essential subsystems.
It demonstrates specific cybersecurity techniques against the components that actually matter on an unmanned system:
- The drive system (four motors)
- An environmental sensor (temperature and humidity)
- A collision-avoidance sensor (ultrasonic)
- A navigation sensor (electro-optical camera)
- An object-recognition sensor (EO/IR camera)
- The camera movement system (gimbal servos)
Plus the command and telemetry data that ties them together. If you can reach any of those, you can affect what the platform does. The Iron Rodent is where we prove that, safely, on the bench.
What comes next
In Part 2, we take the Iron Rodent to the Aerospace Village at DEF CON 31 and turn it into a hardware-in-the-loop capture-the-flag, so people can see the real-time consequences of weak development, design, and operational practices on a sUAS.
The MOUSE family and the ranges we build around it are how we teach secure-by-design for systems that move in the physical world. See our training platforms for the current lineup.
Read on in Part 2: The Iron Rodent at DEF CON.