WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — Within the halls of the Eagle Building at the Museum of Aviation, up the elevator to the second floor and past an exhibit on Explosive Ordinance Disposal, those visiting the museum can lay eyes on one of the institution’s newest exhibits: Cybersecurity in Aviation. Researched and organized by four high school students out of Georgia alongside leadership from the Georgia Tech Research Institute, the Cybersecurity in Aviation exhibit is now available for all museum visitors to view.
The exhibit itself has several features, showcasing the importance of cybersecurity and how it is tied to the United States Air Force.
A timeline on the left-hand-side displays a number of impactful events in the world of cybersecurity such as the “ILOVEYOU” email virus of 2000 or Edward Snowden’s leak of classified information in 2013. The center of the display identifies a number of avionic organizations that play a part in the defense against cyber attacks, while the right side of the display exhibits several aviation systems. All of the research into these different aspects of cybersecurity were completed by four high school students.
Shane Tharani, Tatum Gallahair, Trey Jones and Walker Durham are four students, all with different backgrounds and from different schools. According to Georgia Tech Research Institute Cybersecurity Researcher Moeiini Reilly, each of these students made this experience as professional as possible — they interviewed for their positions, they followed through on deadlines, they even had to take into consideration the cost, the dissemination of information and what kind of display would work best in the museum environment.
According to Durham, an upcoming senior at Northside High School, it was a learning experience that he would not trade away.
“When we started this project, we had no clue what cybersecurity was, we were so confused the first couple of days, but that’s really what the process was — learning what cybersecurity is so we, in turn, can tell other people what cybersecurity is,” Durham said. “I’m very proud of it. We only had about 15 days to do it, and we worked our butts off to get there. I think we effectively did what we were trying to do, which was create an exhibit at the museum for cybersecurity and its relation to aviation. I think we did a good job.”
The Georgia Tech Research Institute, via their K12 outreach program, provided these students with this opportunity. Their mission is “inspire, engage, and impact Georgia educators and students by providing access to experts in the filed of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).”
Reilly said that having the opportunity to work with high school kids was “fun.”
“It’s challenging because they didn’t have a lot of background information on anything related to our exhibit,” Reilly said. “I had them do academic research. I’m doing a PhD right now, I do research for a living.
“I taught them how to perform and conduct academic research, how to synthesize their findings and then how to put it into something that is discernable for regular people. Not an academic research paper, but something that the patrons of the museum — which a lot of times are children — would be able to read and understand.”
Working through the jargon of the tech world, creating an exhibit that would be interesting and understandable to the public, these students completed the project in over 15 days.
According to Reilly, the project provides information that people should be working to understand better — it is important for everyday life.
“Because everything we do is so interconnected, all of our services online, everyone has phones nowadays, you do banking online, you do ticketing online, everything has some internet component — similarly to how you would secure your home to intruders, in the cyberspace, you would secure multiple homes from multiple intruders at all hours of the day,” Reilly said. “I like to say we’re sort of like the janitors that lock up at the end of the day, we make sure every door is locked.
“In cybersecurity, every door has a key that’s changed every hour, and we have to keep up with every key as it’s changing and make sure all of those keys are locking the correct doors, and someone’s always trying to break in. Cybersecurity is important for everyone because the world is so interconnected.”
And in the Air Force, it is no different.
“You can look at things that are happening around the world and see how critical our infrastructure systems are,” Reilly said. “For example, the colonial pipeline hack that happened not too long ago shut down a large portion of our eastern seaboards fuel systems.
“All of these, you may not think they’re interconnected in some way, but they are. Every single one of them has a door and a lock, and single one of them has somebody that has to make sure it stays locked.”
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