Boeing-Built Unmanned Aircraft Set for Flight in 2017; John Launchbury, Lee Pike Comment

Defense industry programmers are working to rewrite software on a Boeing-built unmanned aircraft prior to the drone’s flight in 2017 in order to protect the system from hacking, Nextgov reported Wednesday.

John Launchbury, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s lead for the program, told the publication the program aims “to conduct an experiment to prove that these new coding techniques can create secure code at full scale,” Aliya Sternstein reports.

Launchbury said Boeing is on track to revise all the code on the Little Bird unmanned aircraft by the end of the more than four-year program, according to the report.

National ICT Australia, Rockwell Collins and Galois are also developing software for the drone in an effort to safeguard communications between the ground station and the aircraft from outside intervention, the report says.

Lee Pike, Galois research lead for cyber physical systems, told Nextgov the company intends to transition Galois’ Ivory programming language to Boeing “so that they can rewrite their systems.”

Launchbury said replacement for nearly 70 percent of the mission computer’s code is underway in preparation for a planned flight this summer, Nextgov reports.