LTCS: Lightweight Tree-Chain Scheme for ADS-B Data Authentication

Abstract

As a widely used air traffic monitoring and information transmission technology, the Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) is gradually deployed to aircraft around the world. However, due to the openness of its communication protocol, it is vulnerable to malicious attacks. Aiming at the security threats of ADS-B system, this paper proposes an ADS-B data security scheme on the basis of tree-chain structure to realize the lightweight guarantee of ADS-B message reliability. Firstly, we used the idea of symmetric key delay disclosure in classical data authentication scheme to construct a tree-chain authentication model, which reduces the computation amount in authentication process and the length of key chain. Next, we used SM2 digital signature, which is more secure and computationally efficient, to authenticate the initial information in the signature phase. Compared with the original authentication scheme, our scheme improves the computation speed by about 4 times and reduces the number of keys in the authentication process, and is more applicable for ADS-B use cases with high real-time demand and tight computing resources.