European Aerospace Companies Developing Prototype AI to Protect Aircraft Systems

November 26, 2024

A collection of European aerospace companies, start ups and research centers are partnering to develop an AI agent that can protect aircraft systems from cyber attacks. (Image: Guys Who Shoot/Adobe Stock)

A total of 28 European aerospace industry partners, start-ups and research centers have joined forces on the new Artificial Intelligence Deployable Agent (AIDA) project to develop a sovereign AI-enabled cybersecurity agent to protect aircraft systems from cyberattacks.

The AIDA project is funded by the European Commission through the European Defense Fund (EDF). The goal of this three-and-a-half-year European project is to design an AI with an autonomous or semi-autonomous response capability to provide cybersecurity protection for aircraft systems such as onboard computers and electronic warfare systems on combat aircraft, which are vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks in today’s high-intensity conflicts.

AIDA is the first European structural framework project in support of the NATO concept of Autonomous Intelligent Cyberdefense Agent (AICA).

Thales, the French avionics maker, has been selected as the technical coordinator for the AIDA project, Estonia-based CR14 tasked with managing overall project coordination. This EDF project is a response to three major challenges faced by the armed forces today: attack surfaces are growing due to battlespace digitization; the cyberattack detection-response chain needs to be automated due to the ever-greater use of autonomous systems such as drones and robots; and AI is being used ever more widely both to launch and respond to cyberattacks.

“This project initiated by the European Union is fundamental to the security of our combat systems and the sovereignty of our cyberdefense capabilities," said Christophe Salomon, Executive Vice President, Secure Communications & Information Systems, Thales. "It is a chance for Thales to consolidate its strengths in onboard aircraft systems and sovereign cybersecurity solutions, and a further opportunity to leverage our AI hacking expertise. Thales's AI accelerator, and in particular cortAIx, will be directly involved in the AIDA project. The ultimate goal is to employ AI-enabled techniques for detecting threats and protecting aircraft systems from the growing risks and dangers encountered in today’s high-intensity, technology-driven conflicts.”

Responding to the 2023 European Defense Fund call for projects for the development of deployable autonomous AI agents. Thales submitted an innovative proposal based on the training of intelligent cyberdefense agents capable of identifying, protecting, detecting and responding to cyberthreats in real time in the five military operating domains: land, air, sea, space and cyberspace.

Thales will also lead the project to develop a prototype aircraft using frugal AI agents to protect electronic warfare equipment installed on combat aircraft. This prototype will be tested, using Thales’s Cybels Analytics solution in particular, in scenarios including cyber-electromagnetic threats and advanced adversarial AI attacks.

AI is being used increasingly in the theatre of operations to increase the detection performance of air defense radars, for example, and to help plan tactical missions and assign tasks to swarms of drones and robotic systems. This type of AI must be reliable, robust and cybersafe to prevent it being exploited by hostile forces in any environment (land, sea, air, space and cyberspace). To counter this type of threat, Thales’s Friendly Hacker Unit will conduct a battery of adversarial AI attacks and define appropriate countermeasures to ensure that these cyberdefense AI agents can never become targets themselves.

Thales Research on AI for Aerospace

Thales is a trusted partner of the Galileo satellite navigation system, operating a number of national encryption laboratories in Europe and supplying NATO member countries with the only tactical IP encryptor with "Cosmic Top Secret" security certification. Thales is also a strategic partner of the German, UK, French and Belgian defense ministries for the construction and handover of key management centers and infrastructure.

The Thales Group employs over 600 engineers specializing in AI and around 100 doctoral candidates are conducting their AI research with Thales. Organized within Thales’s AI accelerator for research (AI Lab), systems, including decision support systems, (AI Factory) and sensors, including sonar, radar, radios and optronics, (AI Sensors), these experts are helping to incorporate AI into over 100 of Thales’s products and services.

In 2023, the Group was Europe’s top patent applicant in the field of AI for mission-critical systems. Also in 2023, the Group's Friendly Hacker Unit demonstrated its credentials at the CAID challenge (Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Defense) organized by the French defense procurement agency (DGA), which involved finding AI training data even when it had been deleted from the system to preserve confidentiality.