Abstract
Safety is a simple concept but an abstract task, specifically with aircraft. One critical safety system, the Traffic Collision Avoidance System II (TCAS), protects against mid-air collisions by predicting the course of other aircraft, determining the possibility of collision, and issuing a resolution advisory for avoidance. Previous research to identify vulnerabilities associated with TCAS’s communication processes discovered that a false injection attack presents the most comprehensive risk to veritable trust in TCAS, allowing for a mid-air collision. This research explores the viability of successfully executing a false injection attack against a target aircraft, triggering a resolution advisory. Monetary constraints precluded access to a physical TCAS unit; instead, this research creates a novel program, TCAS-False Injection Environment (TCAS-FIE), that incorporates real-world distributed computing systems to simulate a ground-based attacker scenario which explores how a false injection attack could target an operational aircraft. TCAS-FIEs’ simulation models are defined by parameters to execute tests that mimic real-world TCAS units during Mode S message processing. TCAS-FIE simulations execute tests over applicable ranges (5–30 miles), altitudes (25–45K ft), and bearings standard for real-world TCAS tracking. The comprehensive tests compare altitude, measure range closure rate, and measure signal strength from another aircraft to determine the delta in bearings over time. In the attack scenario, the ground-based adversary falsely injects a spoofed aircraft with characteristics matching a Boeing 737-800 aircraft, targeting an operational Boeing 737-800 aircraft. TCAS-FIE completes 555,000 simulations using the various ranges, altitudes, and bearings. The simulated success rate to trigger a resolution advisory is 32.63%, representing 181,099 successful resolution advisory triggers out of 555,000 total simulations. The results from additional analysis determine the required ranges, altitudes, and bearing parameters to trigger future resolution advisories, yielding a predictive threat map for aircraft false injection attacks. The resulting map provides situational awareness to pilots in the event of a real-world TCAS anomaly.
Highlights
The focus of the aviation industry is passenger safety during flight
This section details the design of the novel Traffic Collision Avoidance SystemFalse Injection Framework (TCAS-FIE), founded in MATLAB, to simulate a ground station adversary attacking an operational aircraft
The analysis includes general statistics and more in-depth descriptive statistics to gain a proper understanding of false injection viability
Summary
The focus of the aviation industry is passenger safety during flight. Airlines have to continually balance passenger safety with customer satisfaction. SDRs are inexpensive radios capable of creating, sending, receiving, and processing Mode S signals. Traffic Collision Avoidance System is the certified collision detection system used on aircraft within the United States [6] It pairs with an aircraft’s Mode S transponder to conduct collision detection communications with surrounding aircraft. TCAS performs its communications using an interrogation and reply process. The interrogating aircraft sends an all-call interrogation to all surrounding aircraft within 30 miles; the interrogating aircraft receives the reply, processes the reported altitude, and measures the aircraft’s bearing. Range, and bearing, TCAS creates a track of the responding aircraft. TCAS continues to interrogate the responding aircraft, until the aircraft no longer poses a threat
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