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In the past, aircraft network design did not demand for information security considerations. The aircraft systems were simple, obscure, proprietary and, most importantly for security, the systems have been either physically isolated or they have been connected by directed communication links. The union of the aircraft systems thus formed a federated network. These properties are in sharp contrast with today’s system designs, which rest upon platform-based solutions with shared resources being interconnected by a massively meshed and shared communication network. The resulting connectivity and the high number of interfaces require an in-depth security analysis as the systems also provide functions that are required for the safe operation of the aircraft. This network design evolution, however, resulted in an iterative and continuous adaption of existing network solutions as these have not been developed from scratch.

Enhancing the comfort for passengers, airlines are constantly increasing the number of services within the aircraft cabin such as meal ordering directly from passenger seats. The payment and menu selection can be completely processed by means of a passenger-individual airline user account also considering the remaining inventory of the galley. The implementation of such type of services is supported by digitalization of cabin business processes. For these new services the airline requires a high availability of the process-related system functions to ensure airline’s revenue and customer satisfaction. A possible approach to reach the target of high availability of these functions is to use the trend of digitalization for improving function-relevant maintenance processes within the aircraft cabin.

The increasing functionality associated with the rising complexity of aircraft cabin systems which are used by cabin crew, passengers, maintenance staff and other stakeholders, requires a reconsideration of the methods for the development of aircraft cabin systems. This paper deals with a model-based security engineering approach based on the so called Three-V-Model as an appropriate process model, which represents the governing system engineering process (SEP) associated with the safety engineering process (SafEP) and the security engineering process (SecEP). All three processes are pursued concurrently and are interacting reciprocally by working within the same system model on each development level. We describe in detail the involved model-based security engineering activities of the SecEP and the integration of the CORAS risk analysis method in a consistent System Modeling Language (SysML) approach.