Abstract
Air traffic control systems based on the ADS-B standard have been widely adopted in civil aviation to the point that they are now considered the de facto standard. ADS-B provides major benefits to airports and airlines by increasing the safety of air traffic management and control and allowing more flights to travel near busy airports. However, the ADS-B technology lacks sufficient security measures. The ADS-B system is vulnerable and exposed to cyberattacks. We survey the potential known threats and attacks against ADS-B and assess the potential cybersecurity threats to air traffic management and control. The widespread use of ADS-B and the lack of security features in it, i.e., all the ADS-B messages are unauthenticated and unencrypted!, makes this necessary. As we demonstrate in the survey, ADS-B’s lack of security features allows injection of false flight data, as well as jamming the wireless communications between airplanes and control towers and preventing the detection of commercial aircrafts by ADS-B ground stations, control towers, and other aircrafts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Ali BS (2016) System specifications for developing an automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) monitoring system. Int J Crit Infrastruct Prot, forthcoming
Ali BS, Majumdar A, Ochieng WY, Schuster W, Chiew TK (2015) A causal factors analysis of aircraft incidents due to radar limitations: The Norway case study. J Air Transp Manag 44–45:103–109
Alonso JJ, Bonnefoy PA, Bono J, Fan A, McConnachie D, Tracey BD, Wolpert D, Xie D (2013) Application of game theoretic models to evaluate airline equipage dynamics of nextgen technologies. In: Aviation technology, integration, and operations conference, Los Angeles, Aug 2013
Benda P (2015) Harnessing advanced technology and process innovations to enhance aviation security. J Air Transp Manag 48:23–25
Costin A, Francillon A (2012) Ghost in the air (Traffic): on insecurity of ADS-B protocol and practical attacks on ADS-B devices. Black hat 2012. https://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-12/Briefings/Costin/BH_US_12_Costin_Ghosts_In_Air_WP.pdf
Davidson J (2013) ADS-B requirements coming into effect. universal weather, 23 Sept 2013. http://www.universalweather.com/blog/2013/09/ads-b-requirements-coming-into-effect/. Retrieved 30 Dec 2016
Gillen D, Morrison WG (2015) Aviation security: costing, pricing, finance and performance. J Air Transp Manag 48:1–12
Hainess B (2012) Defcon 20 − Hacker + Airplanes = No good can come of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk
Horowitz BM, Santos JR (2009) Runway safety at airports: a systematic approach for implementing ultra-safe options. J Air Transp Manag 15(6):357–362
McCallie D, Butts J, Mills R (2011) Security analysis of the ADS-B implementation in the next generation air transportation system. Int J Crit Infrastruct Prot 4(2):78–87
Perrig A, Tygar D (2003) Secure broadcast communication in wired and wireless networks. Springer Science, New York
Purton L, Abbass H, Alam S (2010) Identification of ADS-B system vulnerabilities and threats. In: Australian transport research forum proceedings, Canberra, pp 1–16, Oct 2010
Qiu Q, Fang Z, Gong C (2015) Study on key techniques of aeronautical ad hoc network MAC and network layer. Proced Eng 99:280–291
Rosati S, Kruzelecki K, Heitz G (2016) Dynamic routing for flying ad hoc networks. IEEE Trans Veh Technol 65(3):1690–1700
Schäfer M, Lenders V, Martinovic I (2013) Experimental analysis of attacks on next generation air traffic communication. In: Jacobson M, Locasto M, Mohassel P, Safavi-Naini R (eds) Applied cryptography and network security. Springer, Heidelberg
Signore TL, Hong Y (2000) Party-line communications in a data link environment. In: Proceedings of the 19th digital avionics systems conference, Philadelphia, Oct 2000
Stark B, Stevenson B, Chen YQ (2013) ADS-B for small unmanned aerial systems: case study and regulatory practices. In: Proceedings of the international conference on unmanned aircraft systems (ICUAS), Atlanta, pp 152–159, May 2013
Strohmeier M, Lenders V, Martinovic I (2013) Security of ADS-B: state of the art and beyond. Report No CS-RR-13-10, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Strohmeier M, Lenders V, Martinovic I (2013) On the security of the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast protocol, Jul 2013. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.3664.pdf
Strohmeier M, Schäfer M, Lenders V (2014) Realities and challenges of nextgen air traffic management: the case of ADS-B. IEEE Commun 52(5):111–118
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (2014) Office of inspector general ADS-B program audit report. Report No AV-2014-105, U.S. Department of Transportation
Zaidenberg N, Neittaanmäki P, Kiperberg M, Resh A (2015) Trusted computing and TPM in cyber security: analytics, technology and automation. Book 3, pp 205–212. ISBN 978-3-319-18301-5
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harison, E., Zaidenberg, N. (2018). Survey of Cyber Threats in Air Traffic Control and Aircraft Communications Systems. In: Lehto, M., Neittaanmäki, P. (eds) Cyber Security: Power and Technology. Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering, vol 93. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75307-2_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75307-2_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75306-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75307-2
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)