Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast Communications Research Articles

SOS: Standard-Compliant and Packet Loss Tolerant Security Framework for ADS-B Communications

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) technology, already deployed by the major avionics companies (e.g., QatarAirways and AmericanAirlines), will become mandatory on board of civil and military aircraft flying in Class A, B, and C airspaces by 2020, enabling direct airplanes communications and enhanced flights monitoring. However, ADS-B has been designed without security considerations, thus being vulnerable to a variety of attacks, including message injection and messages order manipulation attacks, that can be easily performed via widely available commercial Software Defined Radios. To address these threats, we present Securing Open Skies (SOS), a standard-compliant, backward-compatible, loss-tolerant, and bandwidth efficient security framework to secure ADS-B communications. SOS leverages the real deployment of densely distributed, participatory ADS-B sensor networks such as OpenSky Network and Flight Radar, and provides message authentication and integrity security services on a time-slot basis, without resorting to any public key cryptography mechanism. Experimental performances obtained through a realistic proof-of-concept, deployed using commercial Ettus Research X310 Software Defined Radios, demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of our solution, even in presence of uniformly at random or burst packet loss events characterizing the ADS-B frequency band. For instance, SOS allows the verification of the authenticity of ADS-B messages requiring less than 50 percent of bandwidth overhead, with a percentage of verifiable slots above 80 percent, even in an highly lossy environment, characterized by a single packet loss probability of 60 percent—the process requiring less than one second: almost one tenth of similar approaches published in the literature. Finally, a thorough comparison against state of the art solutions in the literature highlights the unique security and reliability features enjoyed by SOS, as well as its practical viability.

How to Protect ADS-B: Confidentiality Framework and Efficient Realization Based on Staged Identity-Based Encryption

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is one of the key technologies for future “e-Enabled” aircrafts. ADS-B uses avionics in the e-Enabled aircrafts to broadcast essential flight data such as call sign, altitude, heading, and other extra positioning information. On the one hand, ADS-B brings significant benefits to the aviation industry, but, on the other hand, it could pose security concerns as channels between ground controllers and aircrafts for the ADS-B communication are not secured, and ADS-B messages could be captured by random individuals who own ADS-B receivers. In certain situations, ADS-B messages contain sensitive information, particularly when communications occur among mission-critical civil airplanes. These messages need to be protected from any interruption and eavesdropping. The challenge here is to construct an encryption scheme that is fast enough for very frequent encryption and that is flexible enough for effective key management. In this paper, we propose a Staged Identity-Based Encryption (SIBE) scheme, which modifies Boneh and Franklin's original IBE scheme to address those challenges, that is, to construct an efficient and functional encryption scheme for ADS-B system. Based on the proposed SIBE scheme, we provide a confidentiality framework for future e-Enabled aircraft with ADS-B capability.

EBAA: An efficient broadcast authentication scheme for ADS-B communication based on IBS-MR

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) systems can broadcast satellite-based aircraft position, identification, etc., periodically, and are now on track to replace radar to become the backbone of next-generation air traffic management (ATM) systems. However, ADS-B systems suffer severe cyber-security problems due to the broadcast-type data link and the lack of designed-in security measures. Especially, since ADS-B messages are unauthenticated, it is easy to insert fake aircraft into a system via spoofing or insertion of false messages. Unfortunately, the authentication for ADS-B messages has not yet been well studied. In this paper, based on identity-based signature with message recovery (IBS-MR), an efficient broadcast authentication scheme for ADS-B messages is proposed. The security analysis demonstrates that the scheme can achieve authenticity and integrity of ADS-B broadcast messages, as well as adaptive evolution of broadcasters’ private keys. The performance evaluation shows that the scheme is computationally efficient for typical avionics devices with limited resources. Furthermore, the scheme achieves low communication overhead since broadcast messages can be recovered from signatures, and thus it is suitable for low-bandwidth ADS-B data link.