SDR Policy Enforcement System
While software-defined radios (SDRs) offer great flexibility in the potential range of application software they can support to enable different features, this flexibility could also be abused causing potential disruption of other radio services. Since radio services are easily be argued to be a critical infrastructure due to their use in supporting emergency response and other important operations, such abuse could have sever consequences.

Currently most strategies for ensuring correct behavior of SDRs involved certification of the software and mechanisms build into the SDR to ensure that only certified software is run and that the software in question has not been tampered with (using digital signatures on the software and a list of trusted signers in the SDR).

While this approach has merit, it also has some limitations:

* It doesn't take in account that the SDR may be used by different users. A SDR in the hands of an emergency response coordinator should allow for a greater range of operations than in the hands of normal citizen.
* Parameters outside the SDR may change. For example, in emergency situations policy may allow the SDR to expand or restrict its activity depending on the type of situation and/or the person operating the radio.
* The radio may move to different locations. Regulations differ in different parts of the world and this may impact how the SDR is allowed to operate.
* While the software is certified, this does not guarantee that it is free of bugs that may cause the SDR to produce interference for other users of the radio spectrums.

Scope of Work
This project will build off of the GNU SDR work from NCSA's year 1 NCASSR work to design and implement a Policy Enforcement Layer between an SDR software application and radio components of the SDR, as represented in Figure 1. This layer makes sure than none of the usage of the SDR violates a policy given to the layer by a trusted authority.

The Policy Enforcement Layer sits between the application on the SDR and the radio control components to ensure that the application does not violate a policy given a current user, location, and set of environmental parameters (e.g. state of emergency).

The policy will allow the expression of factors such as the user's identity (using the year 1 authentication work), environmental parameters (simulated in our current work) and location of the SDR (simulated, integration with real GPS if time allows).

The policy language will be designed and implemented in a PEP. A database holding policies on a per-user basis will be created. These will be integrated with the GNU SDR work from the year 1 NCASSR project.
 
Project Leads
Von Welch, NCSA

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The National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research NCASSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is a multi-institutional cybersecurity research team. NCASSR focuses basic and applied research necessary to develop next generation information security technologies that address national cybersecurity needs. NCASSR is led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and supported by funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR).


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