The Department of Transportation‘s inspector general has announced that it will conduct an audit of the Federal Aviation Administration’s role in authorizing operations of small unmanned aircraft systems in U.S. airspace.

The DOT IG said in a memo that it will begin the assessment in November at the FAA’s headquarters, at air traffic facilities and airports across the U.S.

The audit will focus on the impact of the agency’s recently-launched Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability for automated airspace authorizations and how the agency coordinates UAS airspace approvals and notifications between airports, FAA air traffic facilities, LAANC service suppliers and UAS operators.

The FAA launched LAANC in April in partnership with the private sector to speed up approval for use of drones in U.S. airspace. 

The move comes amid efforts of the agency to address the challenges with the growing volume of requests for UAS authorizations in controlled airspace near airports. Since December 2015, the FAA has processed over 1.1M registrations. 

“The continuing growth of UAS within the national airspace system presents challenges for the FAA in maintaining the world’s safest aviation system while fostering innovation,” said the DOT IG.

The Aspen Cybersecurity Group has issued seven principles to bolster the security of Internet-of-Things devices, calling on manufacturers to increase investment, accountability and transparency in their products’ security, to design devices with “updateable” security and to build a multi-layered IoT defense, The Washington Post reported. 

“When left unsecured, however, these devices also carry increased risks to public health and safety, business operations and individual privacy,” the ACG said in a recently-released memo. “As the attack surface continues to expand, there is an acute need to ensure the benefits of IoT— and technological innovation more broadly — are nurtured while simultaneously mitigating against the associated risks.”

ACG’s IoT Security First Principles:

1. Manufacturers should incorporate security at the design phase of IoT devices.
2. Transparency should include details on the security attributes of products and services for the consumer’s awareness.
3. Developers should provide information on product privacy.
4. Manufacturers should be held accountable for the security of their devices.
5. IoT devices should have updateable security to keep up with changing security risks.
6. Products should have multi-layered security and countermeasures that function 
without degrading in the absence of connectivity.
7. Manufacturers should limit device features to “necessity.”

“Changing the dynamic requires an environment that incentivizes products to be secure-by-design and increases transparency to give consumers an opportunity to consider the security and privacy impacts of a product in their purchasing decisions,” the group said. 

The ACG also provided recommendations for increasing the size of the U.S. cybersecurity workforce and a framework to improve cybersecurity collaboration between the federal government and the industry.

The Aspen Institute established the group in 2017, which consists of lawmakers, former government officials, technology experts, scholars and other cybersecurity professionals.

The State Department has announced a plan to relax rules on the sale of some key technologies used on drones and 5G telecommunications devices, which the government currently considers as potential risks, or sensitive, to national security, Defense One reported.

The agency said it will remove some restrictions on the distribution of advanced Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits chips, which provide higher data rates for mobile phones, sensors and other Internet-of-Things devices. 

Under the plan, MMICs would be removed from the Defense Department’s strictly regulated U.S. Munitions List and would be transferred to the Commerce Department’s less stringent Commerce Control List. 

An unnamed State official said such advanced chips “use quite a bit less power than the ones we use in the military arena” for radar and other applications.” 

Meanwhile, the State Department is also considering relaxing rules on the sale of unmanned vehicles with anti-collision radar. 

The planned changes would mainly allow manufacturers to sell “hunter-killer drones” that can detect and disable other autonomous aerial systems. 

U.S. military officials have said it is important to modernize its explosive ordnance disposal technology, National Defense reported Friday.\n

Lt. Gen. Reynold Hoover, deputy commander of the U.S. Army’s Northern Command, said aside from being prepared for counterterrorist operations against insurgents from Iraq and Afghanistan, the country’s military forces must also be ready to demonstrate their weapons capabilities to adversaries Russia and China.

Hoover said during the Global EOD Symposium and Exposition in Bethesda, Md., that enemies often infiltrate the “gray zone”, which “represents challenges and opportunities for our EOD forces that will require strong government and industry cooperation, active academic research and development, and close collaboration between military and civilian law enforcement, the intelligence community and military services”.

He added the importance of not only upgrading military hardware but also boosting troop organization and implementing changes to how warfighters gather and disseminate information.

Military space programs are prioritizing the construction of spacecraft ground segment systems to avoid instances wherein a satellite cannot perform at its optimum capacity because of insufficient ground segment capability, Space News reported Thursday.

Deanna Ryals, chief partnership officer at the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, said a Wideband Analysis of Alternatives study conducted by the U.S. Air Force this summer showed the need to prioritize ground system establishment for future space missions.

The Government Accountability Office identified significant ground segment delays in the GPS III and the Mobile User Objective System satellite programs.

The GPS III’s launch was rescheduled to April 2022.

Andrea Loper, space vehicles directorate acquisition program manager at the Air Force Research Laboratory, said the lab aims to have its ground segment system – which consists of user terminals, command and control platforms and network operations – support as many space missions as possible.

 

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, in cooperation with the National Institute of Science and Technology‘s Engineering Laboratory, has introduced a system that shows how a manufacturing firm can update the security of its industrial control systems via behavioral anomaly detection (BAD).

According to the report published this month, BAD capabilities can help prevent malware attacks and other operational data threats.

The BAD initiative was able to demonstrate threat detection processes based on three different methods: network-based, agent-based and operational historian/sensor-based.

 

Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told Defense News in an interview published Monday that the Pentagon has a “really great road map” for digital modernization.

Shanahan said he believes having an information technology strategy in place could help the Defense Department carry out modernization efforts, such as consolidation of data centers and deployment of a common financial platform.

“So in terms of my time now … I wanted to make sure the foundation was laid for IT,” he noted.

“That was the most important one.”

He noted that DoD adopts and demonstrates commercial best practices through the implementation of category management, use of industry sustainment techniques at Navy aviation depots and cloud migration efforts.

Shanahan also discussed the F-35 fighter jet program and the defense budget.
 

The Aerospace Industries Association has urged Congress and President Donald Trump to ensure a “steady and stable growth” in defense budget for fiscal 2019 and beyond in order to counter threats posed by transnational terrorism, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, Defense News reported Thursday.

AIA said in its Thursday statement lawmakers and the administration have started to provide the Defense Department with additional budget for fiscal years 2018 and 2019 to build up military readiness against multiple threats.

“But the shortfalls of the last decade cannot be erased in the space of two years, and now the administration has announced potential reductions in defense investment that could undermine the improvements that are just now materializing,” the trade group warned.

Trump announced in October that he projects defense spending to be $700B for fiscal 2020, a figure that reflects a potential $33B cut from the Pentagon’s expected budget.

Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said in late October that DoD plans to have two budget requests in place by Dec. 1 – a $733B spending plan and a $700B budget.