Aerospace & Defense

Securing Critical Infrastructure with MILS

By Paul Chen

On February 12, the White House released the Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21), Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience. The DHS website describes PPD-21 as “advancing a national policy to strengthen and maintain secure, functioning, and resilient critical infrastructure.” Sixteen different critical infrastructure sectors are identified, including: Chemical, Communications, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare and Public Health, Food and Agriculture, Nuclear Reactors, Transportation, and Water and Wastewater Systems.

On the same day PPD-21 was released, President Obama also signed Executive Order 13636 for “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity.” The Executive Order directs NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to develop a framework for “reducing cyber risks to critical infrastructure,” for which they have issued an RFI and plan a workshop in late May.

And on March 26, the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, the German Federal Office for Information Security) published the Protection Profile for the Gateway of a Smart Metering System. Such devices will securely collect, process, and store information from smart meters, adding security to smart electricity distribution grids. The protection profile notes that the threat from a remote cyberattack is much higher than that from a local physical attack, since the attacker in network has the potential to compromise not just one, but many components of the infrastructure, or even the corresponding grid.

These developments highlight the focus on improving critical infrastructure security as attacks from cyber-terrorism have increased over the last decade and, alarmingly, in the past year on power, water, and nuclear systems. A recent report states that, indeed, most cyber-attacks now target critical infrastructure, moving “away from hacking and financially motivated crime” to attacks to “deny, disrupt, and destroy” service. For most of us, even the most destructive cyber-attacks like Stuxnet are fairly remote and don’t impact us; but if critical infrastructure services are denied, disrupted, or destroyed, cyber-attacks could become devastatingly personal.

Critical infrastructure systems often use distributed control systems (DCS), industrial control systems (ICS), and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for process monitoring and control. Usually networked and often connected to the public Internet, these DCS, ICS, and SCADA systems are potentially vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Developing more secure DCS, ICS, SCADA systems, and other components of critical infrastructure using the MILS (Multiple Independent Levels of Security) architecture can help improve the overall security of such infrastructure: I explain how below.

The MILS architecture enables security architects to configure the system following the principle of least privilege, which requires that each system component be granted access only to the resources needed to complete its functions. This enables the development of devices and systems that are more resilient against attacks, and better at mitigating potential damage from defective or malicious software. Also, the MILS architecture uses a separation kernel to provide time and space partitioning, information flow control, and fault containment. By providing these capabilities, security-critical components (such as a data guard or process controller) can be separated and protected from less secure components (such as an Internet gateway or network interface) when these components run on the same hardware platform to reduce size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements. And by reducing SWaP, MILS allows devices and systems to be more cost effective to develop, deploy, operate, and maintain.

Underscoring Wind River’s commitment to delivering trusted systems with built-in security capabilities, we have just launched VxWorks MILS Platform 3.0, which implements the MILS architecture with a secure, hypervisor-based separation kernel compliant to the U.S. Government Protection Profile for Separation Kernels in Environments Requiring High Robustness (SKPP), version 1.03. Although NIAP has sunset the SKPP as the basis of a component-level certification process, NSA continues to recommend the use of separation kernels for security-critical systems, making VxWorks MILS Platform an appropriate choice for use in critical infrastructure sub-systems. And to support a wide range of potential evaluation activities, VxWorks MILS Platform provides a complete set of artifacts to support a system-level evaluation process, based on the internationally recognized Common Criteria.

VxWorks MILS Platform 3.0 is an ideal foundation for building secure, cost-effective, and evaluatable DCS, ICS, SCADA, and other security-critical systems. And it’s available today to help secure national critical infrastructure.

 

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The Advent of Multi-core MILS

By Paul Parkinson

It has been a rather long time since my previous blog post. I intended to post a blog before the holidays regarding our partner Curtiss-Wright's announcement about VxWorks MILS support on the VPX6-187, but I simply ran out of time! So here it is as my first blog post of 2013.

The Curtiss-Wright new release was actually quite a game changer. To the casual reader, it may just appear to be about the release of another board support package (BSP) on a leading-edge COTS processor card, but the fact that this BSP supports multi-core for a MILS architecture is what makes this announcement so significant.

When the MILS software architecture was proposed in 1984 by the computer scientist Dr. John Rushby, microprocessors at the time were inherently single-core, and computing performance advances were being driven by clock speed increases and die size, at a rate following Moore's Law.

Over the last decade, single-core processors with robust MMU partitioning have become sufficiently performant to enable viable MILS separation kernels (SK). In recent years, Wind River has implemented VxWorks MILS on single-core processor architectures (PowerPC MPC8548), and on multi-core processors, but only running on a single core (dual-core PowerPC MPC8641D, quad-core Intel Core i7).

However, with the VxWorks MILS Platform, Multicore Edition, the VxWorks MILS separation kernel now runs on all eight cores of the Freescale QoriQ P4080 processor concurrently. Yes that's right, I am talking about (MILS & multi-core) rather than (MILS XOR multi-core). This enables the integration of many MILS solutions on a single processor, creating reduced size, weight and power (SWaP) benefits - even high assurance security-critical systems have tough performance requirements.

The advent of multi-core processor architectures over the last few years has had a dramatic and disruptive effect on the embedded market. This has provided significant benefits in terms of reducing size, weight and power (SWaP), but has also presented some interesting challenges for safe and secure application domains.

For example, the global aerospace market has very mature processes for DO-178B safety-certification on single core processors. Similarly, the security community is approaching maturity for Common Criteria security evaluation on single core processors. But both segments are challenged when driving multicore systems through their respective processes.

There has also been an emerging trend in recent years of individual systems needing to meet both safety-certification and security evaluation, and now with the emergence of multi-core, this presents some new regulatory challenges, but the benefits will be worth the effort.

This convergence is discussed in more detail in the white paper 'Safety, Security and Multicore' which is available for download from the Wind River website.

For additional information from Wind River, visit us on Facebook.

Avionics 2012 conference

By Paul Parkinson

It's been a long time since my previous blog, as unfortunately I've been engrossed in a number of projects!

However, I have just got time to mention that I'm really looking forward to the Avionics Europe conference in Munich on 21-22 March. The conference programme is pretty packed, covering cockpit avionics and technologies for civil and military aircraft; and aircraft, spacecraft and UAV sensor payloads, diagnostics and certification.

I will be presenting a paper on "A Secure Virtualisation Approach to Support Multi-Level Secure Systems, Software Reuse and Incremental Certification" in the Embedded Software session on Wednesday afternoon.

The paper addresses how secure virtualisation approaches can be used to implement a system architecture to securely partition applications and data of different security domains on the same system (such as national Secret and NATO Secret data), whilst enabling the reuse of previously developed software applications and existing intellectual property in an open standards-based communications environment. The paper also includes a discussion on the requirements for supporting incremental safety-certification under RTCA DO-178C / EUROCAE ED-12C and Common Criteria security evaluation at high evaluation assurance levels, and the implementation architecture to support a role-based development process.

Wind River will also be exhibiting at the conference, so why not drop by our stand for a chat and to see a cool avionics display demo?

Secure Mobility Message Resonates at MILCOM 2011

By Chip Downing

MILCOM 2011 last week in Baltimore, MD was not only educational, but it was a watershed event.   Last year, it was a “coming out” party for custom Android devices; this year however, was the year where many companies are now using COTS hardware and software to their fullest extent, along the entire supply chain, from core to edge and user devices.   I believe this COTS adoption is driven by two powerful forces – the exploding capabilities of commercial tablet devices, and global military budget pressures.

The vastly increasing power and capability of commercially available mobile communications devices is simply amazing. Just a few years ago, almost everything in this military communications space was purpose built, and most commercial products were simply inadequate to address the rugged and complex system demands of military communications systems.   As seen at MILCOM 2011, this has officially changed -- COTS end-to-end communications domains rule.

So if all of these MILCOM vendors are not making customized hardware and software, what are they doing?   Wind River had over 500 people visit its booth at MILCOM this year, and most of the discussions I had with both suppliers and end users at the show were about increasing device security and leveraging high volume COTS components in demanding deployment scenarios.

Security is always a challenging problem.  There are many ways to secure a device and its data, and we have found that for systems that need single level security (SLS), our customers really warmed up to our Linux Secure product.   This product is derived directly from our standard Wind River Linux platform that has full traceability back to source and build files, but which also adds COTS Common Criteria EAL4+ and FIPS 140-2 certification evidence for ARM, Freescale, Intel, and TI OMAP processors.   Suppliers can now increase the security of their devices with a COTS Common Criteria path, reducing both time and risk. 

The Common Criteria certification work that we have done for Linux can be expanded to secure Android platforms.  Developers can leverage the work that Wind River has already performed and completed for kernel.org Linux and simply expand those artifacts to include Android capabilities layered on top of the Linux kernel used in Android.

And speaking of Android, securing Android systems was on everyone’s mind this year.   There is certainly a push to create additional and/or layered security on COTS Android devices, which would enable state-of-the-art commercial platforms to be used on the edge of critical military communications systems.  One of the best ways to do this is to insert a platform hypervisor underneath Android to abstract away direct access to the hardware.  Once this very thin abstraction layer is inserted, one can also then add additional Android or other operating environments to a device, enabling very clever and unique devices that can separate key capabilities into controlled execution spaces.  For example, one could mix together a traditional VxWorks-based software defined radio (SDR) environment with an Android or Linux environment using the Wind River Hypervisor.

For customers who need multi-level security (MLS), our VxWorks MILS product fits best.  This secure hypervisor product enables the creation of a robust partitioning architecture supporting multiple independent levels of security (MILS).  Rockwell Collins showcased its SecureOne Cross Domain Technologies in the Wind River booth at MILCOM 2011, which uses a VxWorks MILS foundation.  SecureOne Guard and SecureOne Processor components use VxWorks MILS technology to produce a system for aircraft that can securely connect networks of different classifications, thereby reducing operator workload and reducing the number of systems required to access critical data.  This platform consolidation approach drives down size, weight, and power (SWaP) demands, and, therefore, system costs.

Wind River also showcased two more products at our booth that accelerate the delivery of complex software into advanced custom and COTS silicon – Wind River Simics and Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST) product. 

Wind River Simics is a system simulator capable of simulating systems of arbitrary complexity, from a simple processor and memory, to a system-on-chip (SoC), to a complete board, to a networked system, and even a complete system-of-systems.   Simics enables software developers to immediately and reliably access military communication hardware designs with ease, without the burden of scheduling the availability of actual hardware and associated support equipment.

Finally, our (FAST) product is a meta-test framework that automates software and system tests and their results for mobile Linux and Android devices.  Each individual test framework, test, or application is encapsulated within a "wrapper" script that is executed by FAST during the test run. This wrapper allows the test to be abstracted across multiple product platforms.  FAST includes the full Android Compliance Test Suites (CTS), and accepts existing legacy tests, open source tests, and Wind River–authored tests to accelerate your product testing and delivery. 

It will be interesting to attend next year’s MILCOM in Orlando to see what new communication devices will emerge from this powerful combination of COTS hardware/software platforms, layered security, and advanced tooling that accelerate these systems into the global battle space.

 

For additional information from Wind River, visit http://www.facebook.com/WindRiverSystems.

Embedded Virtualization to Underpin Next Generation Network-Centric Operations

By Chip Downing

“Embedded virtualization” is a technology that is rapidly proliferating in global defense systems that deliver critical data to warfighters.  Embedded virtualization is typically instantiated in small layer of software called a hypervisor that controls all activities and functions on a microprocessor deployed in a military control and communications equipment.

These hypervisors can be foundations for hosting a wide range of complex, dynamic applications for network-centric operations (NCO), electronic warfare (EW) and spectrum planning/electronic warfare battle management (EWBM) systems. Hypervisors enable the migration of existing capabilities from legacy NCO programs onto next generation platforms, enabling wider integration and preserving program investment.  

Embedded virtualization with hypervisors is a proven means to consolidate multiple applications from a diverse supplier base onto a single chip or an array of processors. Hypervisors can be implemented on a wide variety of current military microprocessors and are communications link agnostic.

An embedded virtualization foundation based upon a robust hypervisor enables adaptive growth in capacity and spectrum to address the individual needs of each service, agency, or coalition partner constituency.  Without a virtualization foundation, developing new NCO planning or management platforms from the ground up is costly and would take years to define, get under contract, develop, and deploy.

To conceptualize a hypervisor, think of an iPhone or an Android device. An Android device allows multiple applications from multiple developers to run independently on a single smartphone device. Users can individualize their Android phones by selecting apps that meet their individual needs, and downloading these capabilities on demand as required.

An embedded hypervisor creates this same type of iPhone or Android application enablement, but in a wider, more open, and universal context.  Today there are flexible commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hypervisors that can support simultaneous secure communications applications from different sources and suppliers using multiple operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, and Android on a shared compute device.  Like Android devices, these foundations can simultaneously support GSM, 3G, 4G, and other cellular links, along with a wide range of military communication channels and software defined radio (SDR) waveforms.   

Wind River embedded virtualization solutions are based upon open, global industry standards.  Unlike consumer and IT solutions, Wind River virtualization solutions optimize the physical silicon environment, with focused multi-core utilization, real-time performance and system robustness, enabling deployment of hypervisor-based critical infrastructure and control systems, with full support of demanding safety and security certifications at their highest levels, including Common Criteria EAL6+ and FAA DO-178B Level A.

These Wind River embedded virtualization solutions are operational today in more than 200 critical aerospace and defense programs worldwide and robustly consolidate a wide range of critical applications from global aerospace and defense suppliers.

For example, one Wind River virtualization solution, VxWorks 653, has achieved Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) RTCA DO-178B Level A for use on commercial jetliners, and is now used on the Boeing 787, P-8 MMA, and more than 40 other aircraft.  On the 787, Wind River’s virtualization foundation enabled Boeing to eliminate more than 100 line replaceable units (LRUs) and integrate applications from more than 15 different suppliers on a single compute platform, substantially compressing size, weight and power (SWaP) while reducing certification cost and risk.

Other Wind River customers are using Wind River virtualization platforms as a foundation for deploying multi-level security (MLS) applications on a single device.   This integration and separation of multiple security domains removes the multiple layers of dedicated, single-domain legacy hardware environments that makes multiple service, agency, and collation partner operations both expensive and unwieldy.

Wind River virtualization solutions have complete, open-standards-based toolsets for development, and support the robust insertion of new applications while minimizing the need for end-to-end platform testing.  These solutions support the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) and have COTS strategies for insertion into high-security-critical (National Security Agency / Common Criteria) and safety critical (FAA RTCA DO-178B) environments.

Use of Wind River embedded virtualization platforms enable:

• The utilization of legacy program and system investments on new platforms
• Multiple defense supplier, multiple operating system integration
• The protection of future investments, rapidly moving to newer processors and environments
• Optimization of hardware platforms, consolidating multiple legacy systems / domains into one
• Improving operational security, safety, mobility, and real-time performance in smaller devices

More information on Wind River virtualization solutions can be found at:

Wind River Hypervisor: http://windriver.com/products/hypervisor/

Wind River VxWorks 653: http://www.windriver.com/products/platforms/safety_critical_arinc_653/

Wind River VxWorks MILS: http://www.windriver.com/products/platforms/vxworks-mils/

Fun with VxWorks MILS 2.1

By Paul Parkinson

It’s been a while since my previous blog, as I have been rather preoccupied with responding to a number of RFPs. However, I’ve managed to find some time to work on some demos for VxWorks MILS 2.1, which has been fun.

VxWorks MILS 2.1 introduced support for Wind River Linux as a Guest OS (VxWorks Guest OS and High Assurance Environment (HAE) having been supported in the earlier VxWorks MILS 2.0 release). I wanted to get some more hands-on experience of using Wind River Linux as a Guest OS (GOS) running on the VxWorks MILS 2.1 Separation Kernel (SK). So, I started with a version of the Blaster Blastee demo which had been modified by one of my colleagues in Engineering to use a Linux GOS partition for the Blaster. (Blaster Blastee is a well-known Wind River demo which provides a nice flexible framework for blasting TCP or UDP packets between nodes, testing network connectivity and performance).

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to extend the demo to also use Linux in a second partition as the Blastee (receiver), to demonstrate the scalability and determinism of the MILS SK with multiple Linux virtual boards (VB).

This proved to be quite easy to configure, as I was able to use the same Linux kernel image as the Blaster virtual board, but with different boot parameters (as this virtual board was using a separate dedicated Gigabit Ethernet device on my target board, with its own IP address), and I just invoked the Blastee executable which had been built into the Linux GOS filesystem. Once I had added a timeslot allocation for the Blastee VB into the MILS system schedule, I was able to build and run the system and send packets between the two partitions via external Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

(Side note: Alternatively, I could have sent packets directly between the two partitions either by using Secure IPC ports via the MILS SK according to pre-defined security policy, or even via an IP tunnel over SIPC, but I used the external Ethernet interfaces, as I wanted to extend the demo further).

The next step was to configure this Linux GOS-based system to send and receive packets via the two Ethernet ports to corresponding VxWorks GOS-based Blaster and Blastee virtual boards on a second board. This configuration can be used to simulate a Public Network and a Secure Network connection between two nodes (see diagram above). The original MILS Blaster Blastee demo also includes a trusted Security Audit partition, running in a High Assurance Environment, which monitors the audit log for each partition, and also a Rogue partition which attempts to illegally access the Secure Network interface to intercept traffic (which is of course prevented by the MILS SK). When this demo is running freely, the link lights on my Gigabit switch flicker away furiously, and the VxWorks MILS partitions report output via the multiplexed serial I/O output to a host console.

To really see inside the system, and to step through the interactions of the sender and receiver (Linux Blaster to VxWorks Blastee over the Secure Network, and VxWorks Blaster to Linux Blastee on the Public Network), I used Wind River Workbench to debug all four connections concurrently, using Linux user-mode agents in each of the Linux VBs, and On-Chip Debugging (OCD) via JTAG to debug the VxWorks Blaster and Blastee. In this way, I could step through the sending and receiving of packets in both directions over the two networks (rather than having to rely on printf(), which would have been difficult to correlate across multiple partitions). The screen shot shows the point at which I am stepping through send and receive (the size of the screen shot is constrained by my 19” monitor).

So, this demo shows how the High Assurance Environment, VxWorks GOS and Linux GOS can all run on top of the MILS Separation Kernel and still provide good network performance despite being in a time-partitioned environment.

Autonomy and Robotic Advancement

By Mike Deliman

A few months ago at the Robotics Virtual Trade Show, in my presentation I spoke about the evolution of robotic systems.  One thing I predicted was as time goes on, robots will become more independent and autonomous, performing more of the work humans and mainframe-style systems have traditionally performed.  

Among the robots I talked about were robots similar to NASA's 
Stardust Spacecraft  Stardust is currently on course for a Valentine's Day rendezvous with Comet Temple-1.  Stardust includes a package that performs autonomous navigation, d to help keep the craft on it's flight path with reduced intrusion from ground-based systems.  Since Stardust is so far out from earth, there is significant delay in round-trip communications.  Stardust is able to detect problems in trajectory and perform course correction maneuvers on its own.

Last week, Northrop Grumman had  first-flight for an evolution in Un-maned Aerial Vehicles.  The 
X47B UCAS   is an autonomous unmanned flight system.  It is not a wireless-joystick system.  It flies itself, taking off, figuring a course to it's way points, landing.  Without human intervention.

This, in general, is the trend of the robotic future.  There will be more "robots" in all sectors, the robots will become more autonomous, and perform more of the work regarding their duties than in the past.

In general a robot is an artificial entity that performs work for humans.  I broaden this definition to include telepresence systems (telerobotic surgeons, astronauts, and systems like aercams on the ISS), and lifestyle assistants (products such as drobo, tivo, and roomba).  My thoughts are that these consumer systems are both cutting edge, and primitive.

They are cutting edge in that they do some pretty incredible things in comparison with competing products that were available at the times these were invented.  They also pushed conventional wisdom about engineering and marketing, and created some cool and popular products.  They are primitive when you consider what technologies are available and how they could be used to upgrade these devices, and how these technologies will evolve over the next 5 years.  If you think about DVR boxes, you can get new DVRs from many makers,  yet used TiVos sell for over $200!  It's because TiVo can use the programming you record to automagically select other programs to record for you.  It anticipates and adapts based on your habits.  This capability differentiates it from other DVRs.  It does more work for you than others do.

This trend of more intelligence and autonomy will eventually blend its way into everything from automotive products to tourism.  It could lead to smarter cars that can detect when the driver's attention is lapsing or alert that it is unsafe to pass due to oncoming traffic.  There may someday be a system of telepresence pods anywhere on earth or even in orbit, where you could schedule a short vacation and experience a different world just by putting on a special helmet and gloves.  With such systems you could control a telerobotic diver and explore a sunken wreck, then change connections and view the Earth and stars from orbit... Possibly even while driving home from work. 

Such systems require many things to make real, among them is vision and technology.  With the proper technology your vision may be wrought into reality.  WindRiver is proud to be involved with programs like NASA/JPL's Stardust and Northrop Grumman's X47 UCAS.  Congratulations to X47B on successful first flight, and Stardust's upcoming Valentine's day rendezvous.

High Assurance Systems Development Using the MILS Architecture

By Paul Parkinson

When I'm discussing VxWorks MILS with Wind River customers, I often find that in addition to wanting hear about the capabilities and features of the platform, they are also interested in the rationale for the MILS architecture and the implementation approach for the VxWorks MILS separation kernel.

So, I've recently written a technical white paper "High Assurance Systems Development using the MILS Architecture" with my colleague Arlen Baker. This provides a technical deep-dive on the implementation approach taken for the VxWorks MILS separation kernel, and discusses how MILS technologies can be used to develop sophisticated Cross Domain Solutions (CDS) and Multi-Level Secure (MLS) systems, such as MILS-based gateways.

This MILS technical white paper is now available in PDF for download from the Wind River website (registration required). I hope you find it interesting and informative, and I look forward to receiving feedback.

VxWorks MILS 2.1 Platform hands-on

By Paul Parkinson

I visited Wind River headquarters in Alameda, California, to learn about VxWorks MILS Platform 2.1 and to get hands-on experience with the release.

I had been looking forward to the trip, as the 2.1 release adds some significant new capabilities: Wind River Linux as a guest operating system and the new High Assurance Network Stack (see Bill Graham's recent blog for a more detailed overview).

So, the VxWorks MILS separation kernel (SK) can now host Wind River Linux, VxWorks and a High Assurance Environment as guest operating systems in a virtualised environment (as shown below).

To me this is a very significant development, as it extends the depth and breadth of applications which can be run in on top of VxWorks MILS. This enables existing applications to he hosted securely in a high robustness system, but also enables new systems to be developed using the most appropriate technologies for a given component.

Of course, learning the theory is great, but it is not as much fun as hands-on experience, so I was glad to have the opportunity to run some Wind River Linux demo applications on top of VxWorks MILS and run and debug them using Wind River Workbench while I was in Alameda.

The screenshot below shows Workbench debugging a multi-threaded Linux application running on top of VxWorks MILS 2.1 on my PowerPC 8548-based demo board. There's a thread-specific breakpoint on a line of shared code, which can be used to halt one thread while the other thread(s) run free. 

The next step will be to incorporate these new capabilities into some MILS demos. Stay tuned.

Bringing Home the Science Bacon

By Mike Deliman

MRO recently passed a milestone of bringing back more data than all previous deep space missions combined.  To do this MRO was equipped with a large dish antenna and powerful radio, and is running a more powerful computer than it's companions on and orbiting Mars.  It gets a fair share of antenna time from the DSN antennae on the ground.

Science means collecting data, processing it for it's information, and analyzing the information.  All of these activities can be greatly facilitated by some degree of computer assistance. When it comes to remote-operated scientists (rovers, gliders, orbiters, diggers, swimmers, crawlers, hover-ers..) the computer has to do all the work.

Where it comes to an autonomous robot, or even partially autonomous, a balance must be struck between the amount of data that can be brought back (telemetry bandwidth), the amount of data collected by the science instruments, the amount of processing it takes to turn the data into information, and the processing ability of the computer(s) in the robot.  If the largest gating factor is the bandwidth, and you can gain 10x the science return by processing the data first, you may limit how much data you collect in favor of processing it into information.  If your biggest limitation is processing power, you may just concentrate on getting data off of science instruments and ready for transmit back.  The typical deep space mission has both challenges, and more.

There are terrestrial applications that have similar challenges.  Remote sensing networks, deep sea ROVs and robots, and some industrial applications, as well as military applications, may need to operate independently for periods of time, storing data for upload at the "next" connection.  There could be limitations on storage, processing ability, power, connection bandwidth. 

Some of the solution could be to run multicore.  You may be able to run a multicore chip at a reduced clock rate to save power and gain more processing power than a similar single-core chip at full clock speed.  By increasing the processing power, and using mixed methods (SMP,AMP) as in Mark's "Sea Of Cores...Now What?" discussion, you may be able to handle both steering data and processing it into information. This could increase the science return of the mission.  But with multicore, how do you balance the trade-offs and where do you focus your increase in processing power?

By simulating the whole affair you may be able to gauge how fully loaded your system is.  If you have processing power left, and also important, data steering capacity left, you may be able to share your telemetry stream with another project.  This is part of what NASA has done with the satellites orbiting Mars and the MER and Phoenix robots. The robots collect their data and do what processing they can, storing the results.  They are designed to send data directly to Earth, and do.  When possible, they can also transfer data to the satellites, borrowing some of their bandwidth.  By using a little slack-time in the orbiter's schedules, they're increasing the science return of the robots on the surface.

Increasing the processing power of one key system can increase the data-product returns of an entire group of systems. It can increase the returns both in terms of the quantity of data and quality of information returned.  With careful planning, the "more remote" systems can be coordinated to take advantage of data-stream offload, perhaps doing some data processing, or just collecting more raw data.  Prudent use of a virtualized / multicore system could be one great way of doing this.

None of the current Mars robots are empowered with multicore - when they were designed multicore wasn't as prevalent as today, and there are still very few multicore chips designed for the rigors of space.  There are plenty of off-the-shelf chips with multiple cores available.  Terrestrial based applications can start benefiting from SMP/AMP systems today.