Towards DO-178C Compliance of a Secure Product

An approach to enhancing the cybersecurity of airborne systems is integrating certified secure products, given that the secure products demonstrate their compliance to the airworthiness standards. We conduct an evaluation of a COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) secure product against DO-178C, so that it can be certified once integrated into an airborne system. Although the secure product has been certified under Common Criteria (CC), certifying it against DO-178C poses new challenges to the developer due to the different focuses of the two certification standards. While CC primarily focuses on evaluating the security features of a product, DO-178C places greater importance on ensuring the integrity of development assurance processes. This paper presents the insights that we obtained while addressing the challenges encountered during the evaluation under DO-178C.