Aircraft airframes operate for 30 to 40 years. Cryptographic algorithms protecting airborne firmware today must withstand quantum attacks decades into the future. Here is our post-quantum roadmap.
We evaluate the integration of lattice-based ML-DSA (Dilithium) and hash-based SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+) into ARINC 645 digital software signatures, ensuring that aircraft field-loadable software remains secure against harvest-now-decrypt-later adversaries.
Testing on standard DO-254 FPGA and multicore embedded targets demonstrated that ML-DSA signature verification requires less than 45 kilobytes of RAM and executes in under 8 milliseconds, making it immediately viable for commercial flight computers.