A Practical and Compatible Cryptographic Solution to ADS-B Security

Abstract

As the heart of next-generation air transportation systems, the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is becoming a substitute for the radar, because it can enhance flight safety by requiring aircraft to regularly broadcast their precise geographic positions. Despite its promise, the lack of security mechanisms, e.g., not providing data encryption and message authentication, is a significant barrier to realistically deploy this new technology. While many methods have been proposed for ADS-B security, they can deal with either privacy or integrity unilaterally, and also need to change current ADS-B standards. In this paper, we present a new cryptographic solution to ADS-B security by first carefully exploiting some cryptographic primitives, and then adapting them to the air traffic-monitoring scenario. In contrast to previous approaches, our proposed solution is not only of high compatibility with existing protocols of ADS-B, but also lightweight for congested data links and resource-constraint avionics. Furthermore, it can also tolerate package loss and disorder that frequently occur in ADS-B wireless broadcast networks, making the proposed solution easy-to-deploy and practical. Security analysis shows that our proposal simultaneously achieves the confidentiality and authenticity of ADS-B messages. In addition, performance evaluation also demonstrates the efficiency of communication and computation for the proposal by using flight data of OpenSky-a sensor network that covers Central Europe aiming at gathering ADS-B flight data. Finally, the deployment in a real airport environment also proves the effectiveness of our solution.