ADS-B encryption

Security analysis of the ADS-B implementation in the next generation air transportation system

In this paper, we develop a novel method to detect Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) spoofing for an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) equipped aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has mandated [18] all civil aircraft to be ADS-B Out equipped by January 1, 2020. The ADS-B Out broadcast sent to Air Traffic Control (ATC) consists of the aircraft's position, velocity, and other aircraft-specific information, all of which being unencrypted, poses a serious integrity threat. With readily available ADS-B trackers [19], [20], a spoofer can accurately track an aircraft to generate a spoofed trajectory that can go undetected [11]. We propose a novel method to modulate the ADS-B Out position broadcast such that a spoofed trajectory generated using the modulated ADS-B will be detectable by comparing Inertial Navigation System (INS) positions against those obtained using the spoofed GNSS signal. The amplitude of ADS-B modulation is selected to exceed the nominal INS error covariance so that spoofing is observable. In this work, we analytically quantify the magnitude of ADS-B modulation that will be sufficient for spoofing detection. During scenarios of GNSS signal jamming and spoofing, reauthentication of a reacquired GNSS signal is necessary to maintain integrity. During a GNSS outage, given enough time, the INS solution drift will grow large enough such that the spoofed GNSS solution might be within the INS error covariance envelope and go undetected. For GNSS outage scenarios we propose continuous modulation of ADS-B position and analytically quantify the magnitude such that spoofing of the GNSS signal is detectable after signal is re-acquired.

Technological independence is important for every country in global competition. One of the technological advancements developed by the Indonesian government through BPPT is Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) type in, which functions as a flight monitoring system. The Indonesian Air Force (TNI AU) through Depohar 50 (Depot Maintenance 50) has also developed ADS-B type in, which is currently deployed in six radar units known as the Flight Monitoring System (FMS) Mode-S. Accordance with government regulations (Minister of Transportation Regulation No. 81 of 2017), the government has mandated the use of ADS-B for flight safety. ADS-B has two types, in and out. In the TNI AU, ADS-B out is installed on aircraft such as Grob, KT-1, and Cessna, while ADS-B in is installed on Weibel radar. However, since ADS-B is not yet installed on TNI AU aircraft, flight data from the Air Traffic Control (ATC) was communicated to the pilots, hence, they can be aware of the air traffic situation. Furthermore, due to the increasing air traffic, communication with ATC has become limited. A qualitative method was used in the development of the ADS-B type in TNI AU aircraft, and the previous ADS-B type in development could only be installed on the ground station. The information received from ADS-B on the aircraft was real-time air traffic, which helps pilots make decisions to enhance flight safety, such as reducing the risk of aircraft collisions. The use of this technology on TNI AU aircraft is important for improving flight safety and technological independence.

Operations in the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) are planned to have a reduced dependency on primary surveillance radar and use Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) to provide aircraft state information to Air Traffic Control (ATC) and onboard collision detection and avoidance systems. With the ongoing integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in the National Airspace System (NAS), ADS-B is expected to become the main surveillance input to UAS collision avoidance. Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) is unable to meet requirements in terms of adaptability to future operations with reduced separation margins, addition of new user groups (e.g., UAS), and support of additional surveillance inputs. Airborne Collision Avoidance System (ACAS X) is being designed to meet these requirements and to increase surveillance, alerting, and resolution performance. The RTCA has released Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) to provide system and operational performance characteristics that ADS-B must provide. This paper analyzes recorded ADS-B data from test flights that were performed in the Continental U.S. (CONUS) and verifies measured performance with specified operational characteristics in terms of coverage, accuracy, and integrity.

Examining visitors’ spatiotemporal movement patterns within parks and protected areas (PPAs) has become an informative methodology for management actions and understanding visitor behavior. This work has given managers and researchers a better understanding of visitor spatial behaviors, spatiotemporal resource impacts, and theoretical and organizing frameworks for approaching this type of research. However, few studies have examined the spatial patterns of air traffic, specifically low-level air tours, above PPAs and the resulting impacts to visitors’ experience and the natural soundscapes. This need is particularly relevant in the U.S. due to legislative mandates that the National Park Service (NPS) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have to manage air tours over NPS units. Further, prior studies have shown how air tours negatively impact both visitors’ experience and the natural soundscapes. Understanding the spatiotemporal patterns of air tours is critical for the managers working with air tour operators and the FAA for planning, ensuring compliance with management decisions, and examining the effects of aircraft noise on PPA resources and the on-the-ground visitors. Recently enacted laws and regulations across the globe, including the U.S., are requiring all aircraft operating in controlled airspace to equip air traffic tracking technology called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) Out avionics. ADS-B Out broadcasts an unencrypted and publicly accessible signal that relays latitude, longitude, altitude, and unique identification code. In the U.S., this code can then be cross-referenced to a publicly accessible database with information including the type/model of aircraft and the registered owner. Only a single prior study has examined ADS-B data over NPS units, finding both potential and limitations to this new technology for tracking air tours. This study seeks to expand methodological improvements and ADS-B’s potential to inform management actions by exploring ADS-B data at Haleakalā National Park (HALE). This study explores the use of ADS-B data at HALE for monitoring compliance with spatially explicit conditions within a preexisting agreement established between the park and air tour operators. The study identified 321 air tours, compared with 454 air tours reported by operators over the same time period. Compliance with the spatially explicit agreement conditions was generally high, though better for lateral offsets than minimum altitude requirements. Overall, this study advances methodological uses of ADS-B logging to track air tours over PPAs and advances knowledge about the potential utility and current limitations of using ADS-B tracking systems for compliance in PPA contexts. Subscribe to JPRA

ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast) involves broadcasting the latitude, longitude, altitude, velocity, identification and other information from on-board systems. Any suitable receiver may receive and process these broadcasted messages, which can be an ADS-B Ground Station which processes the ADS-B messages and generates aircraft reports to be used by Air Traffic Controllers.

This research summarizes research done on the topic of global air traffic control, to include technology, controlling world organizations and economic considerations. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) proposed communication, navigation, surveillance, air traffic management system (CNS/ATM) plan is the basis for the development of a single global CNS/ATM system concept as it is discussed within this study. Research was evaluated on the efficacy of a single technology, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) within the scope of a single global CNS/ATM system concept. ADS-B has been used within the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Capstone program for evaluation since the year 2000. The efficacy of ADS-B was measured solely by using National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) data relating to accident and incident rates within the Alaskan airspace (AK) and that of the national airspace system (NAS).

To improve the efficiency, safety, and capacity of air space system, an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is one of the popular technologies used in air traffic surveillance.The ADS-B uses 1090 MHz band.ADS-B is complemented by existing radar-based technologies to locate aircraft.The coexistence of radar systems and ADS-B is a key system to detect and resolve conflicts in the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NGATS).But, the major disadvantage of ADS-B is its implementation complexity and increase in cost without user-friendly.This paper focuses to reduce the complexity and cost of ADS-B system implementation in MATLAB with the help of Software Defined Radio (SDR).SDR is user-friendly and easy to handle aircraft information without increasing the cost.The ADS-B system implemented with SDR can receive the multiple numbers of aircraft information such as altitude, latitude, longitude, speed, and direction in real-time.Usage of SDR maximizes the information coverage with reliability and can achieve timely communication in Air Traffic Control (ATC) networks.

Application layer interoperability between the surveillance broadcast services system (SBSS) and automatic dependent surveillance - broadcast (ADS-B) avionics is a critical requirement for the next generation air transportation system (NextGen). Demonstrating compatibility between the SBSS and avionics requires the integration of diverse avionics tools, simulated environments tools, RF transmitter test sets, signal analyzers, SBSS equipment, and other receiving systems. ITT has developed a testbed that enables not only validation of the SBSS requirements and RTCA standards, but also provides a window into the user's perspective for various applications. The RF transmitter test set is particularly valuable for generating simulated aircraft flight patterns because it can produce 1090, UAT, and 1030 messages with dynamically programmable content. These ADS-B, Mode S, and ATCRBS messages stimulate SBSS behavior, resulting in transmissions that affect the information and system states held by avionics and air traffic control. A series of simulations with the SBSS and avionics in the loop are conducted and subsequently analyzed.

Millions of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS), or drones weighing less than 55 pounds, will fly in urban airspaces within a decade. This is in addition to goals for increased Urban Air Mobility (UAM): larger transportation UAS and piloted air vehicles, including air taxi service and innovative aviation designs to revolutionize transportation. A significant problem is the lack of current management systems for this extremely large volume of air traffic, composed of heterogeneous drone shapes, sizes, and onboard equipment capabilities, flying adjacent to larger UAM vehicles in spaces previously unoccupied by General Aviation (GA). Robust and resilient detection, identification, localization, and tracking of sUAS sharing UAM airspace is complicated by urban factors such as non-transmitting, non-cooperative drones. Exacerbating these challenges, current technological limitations and vulnerabilities in Global Positioning System (GPS), Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), and Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) can pose safety and security threats. To streamline a vision of safe and secure sUAS-UAM shared airspace, we propose Drone Net, a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) network of multi-modal ground and flight instruments. Drone Net is an architecture fusing a network of passive visual and acoustic sensor nodes with active Radio Detection and Ranging (radar) and Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) sensing methods for UTM, designed for integration with existing Air Traffic Control (ATC) and future UAM systems. The purpose of the Drone Net system is to evaluate use of Electro-Optical/Infrared (EO/IR) and acoustic arrays networked within an urban UAS operating region such as uncontrolled Class-G and waiver-granted Class-D airspace. The Drone Net approach combines detection, tracking, and localization estimation from radar, ADS-B, and EO/IR such that the design is robust to sensor errors, sample loss, and spoofing or other types of attacks. The system experimental design allows for emulation of corrupted ADS-B, GPS, and INS data on our flight platform including capability to communicate with ground radar and EO/IR to recover from flight instrument major and minor malfunctions such that a Drone Net cooperative UAS can be engineered to be fail-safe and fail-secure. We hypothesize that the Drone Net network of rooftop sensors, shown below, provides this conceptualized fail-safe, fail-secure property based upon the combination of self-localization with backup and confirming data from the ground sensor network. Further, with ground-system sensor fusion as well as UTM flight plan and registration information fusion, the overall system can manage small UAS that are both compliant and non-compliant alongside GA and UAM more safely than a single mode like ADS-B alone. To test our hypothesis, we envision two experiments this year. First, a test to confirm that we can emulate ADS-B, GPS, and INS sensor data corruption, leading to recovery using backup flight (lidar, EO/IR) or ground (radar, EO/IR) data to safely land an ALTA6 or other test UAS. Second, a series of Sense-and-Avoid (SAA) experiments between our test UAS and a tethered aerial obstacle. In the future, we will use this experience with fail-safe, fail-secure methods and software to further test more advanced scenarios between multiple UAS. The network of Drone Net instruments in a local area as well as regional and more global cloud-based networks will allow for heterogeneous information fusion and algorithm development for multi-sensor drone detection, classification, and identification with more accuracy than a single database or sensor system. The latent power of the Drone Net project is in its open-design ground and flight sensor network with data sharing capability to improve data mining and machine learning over time for analysis and security applications. More concrete applications for Drone Net include UTM integration with ATC and UAM, but also airspace safety and security for campus and public venues in general. Herein, we will present our experimental design and current test data from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in collaboration with University of Colorado Boulder toward completing the open specification for ground and flight instruments. We would additionally like to invite others to participate in growing the network and the data available for UTM, UAM, and GA shared airspace research.

This paper designs, simulates, and tests a potential Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) space-oriented message set to improve situational awareness of commercial space vehicles inside the National Airspace System (NAS), and to minimize their impacts and potential hazards on the NAS. ADS-B is considered as the solution to integrate the future commercial space transportation system with the air transportation system. To accommodate future space flight operations in the NAS, a potential ADS-B space-oriented message set is proposed to be exclusively transmitted from space vehicles to other traffic and air traffic controllers. New data fields are defined in the message set to cover a space vehicle's entire flight profile. The formats of these new data fields are demonstrated in details. A simulation is created containing space vehicle and aircraft trajectories to test the functionality of the ADS-B space-oriented message set. The message set is encoded at the space vehicle site, transmitted from space vehicle to aircraft via the Universal Access Transceiver (UAT) datalink, and decoded at the aircraft site. The simulation eventually reaches a conflict scenario. By using the Closest Point of Approach (CPA) algorithm, the aircraft analyzes its own state vector and the space vehicle's state vector decoded from ADS-B messages to perform conflict detection. Sensitivity studies are conducted based on the CPA algorithm concentrating on three ADS-B system parameters, which are message update rate, data latency, and state vector accuracy.

국제해사기구(International Maritime Organization, IMO)에서는 선박의 해상 충돌을 방지하기 위하여 SOLAS의 요구조건에 따라 모든 선박에 대하여 선박자동식별장치(Automatic Identification System, AIS)를 의무적으로 장착하도록 권고하고 있다. AIS를 사용하면 타선에 대한 제원 및 항행정보의 획득이 가능하여 충돌방지뿐만 아니라 광역관제, 조난 선박의 탐색구조 등 안전관리에도 활용이 가능하다. 본 논문에서는 AIS 장비를 사용하여 ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast) 개념 기반의 항공감시용 송수신기를 구현한 결과에 대하여 살펴보도록 한다. 기본적으로 AIS는 해상에서 사용되기 때문에 고도 정보를 사용하지 않지만, AIS 장비 내부에 사용하는 GPS (Global Positioning System) 칩셋에서 제공하는 고도 정보의 추출이 가능하다. 고도 정보를 포함한 감시 메시지 형식을 정의하고, SOTDMA (Self-Organizing Time Division Multiple Access) 방식을 개선하여 ADS-B 송수신기를 구현하였다. 적용 결과를 확인하기 위하여 지상시험 및 비행시험을 수행하였다. International Maritime Organization (IMO) recommends the installation of an Automatic Identification System (AIS) according to requirements by SOLAS to avoid maritime collision. AIS provides traffic information of other ships that may be used for maritime traffic control, SAR (Search and Rescue) and collision avoidance to apply safety management. In this paper, preliminary results to implement an aeronautical surveillance transceiver using AIS transceiver based on ADS-B concepts are described. Although altitude information is not required for AIS since the AIS is operated at MSL (Mean Sea Level), altitude information can be extracted by a GPS (Global Positioning System) chip-set in the AIS transceiver. ADS-B transceiver is implemented by defining a surveillance message format including the altitude information and modifying SOTDMA (Self-Organizing Time Division Multiple Access) protocol. Ground tests and flight tests are performed to validate the implementation results.

One of the disadvantages of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) communications protocol is its vulnerability to a number of security attacks since it broadcasts information of the flying aircraft carrying the device over unencrypted datalink. As the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has mandated the use of ADS-B by 2020, solid, reliable security solutions are needed to secure ADS-B data exchange. The first step in this regard is investigating ADS-B attacks and their impacts on air traffic. Therefore, in this paper, we describe a preliminary work performed to study some effects of an ADS-B attack category, message injection, using Hardware in the Loop testing platform. Using a set of flight plans developed to generate aircraft encounters, results show that this attack can distract pilots and ground controllers, cause air traffic disturbance, and increase the risk of aircraft collisions.

This paper presents a system in concept development that combines the integrity of the civil automatic dependant surveillance - broadcast (ADS-B) system for air-to-air conflict avoidance and air traffic management (ATM) surveillance with the military secure Mark XIIA Mode 5 Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system as the data link. This new system, coined Military ADS-B (MADS-B), expands the traditional IFF surveillance data of range, azimuth, altitude, and identity (ID) to include each platformpsilas dynamic state of motion and status. This self-reporting system significantly improves positioning and status data between Tri-Service platforms and with Allies - who are also transitioning to the common Mode 5 system. Beyond MADS-Bpsilas securing of ADS-B data, it enables overcoming other surveillance and navigation shortfalls through future software based message additions. The paper summarizes ADS-B operations, the conversion of data to the Mode 5 Level 2 formats, and examples of message extensions providing surveillance enhancements.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study the various solutions and recommendations provided by researchers in applying the blockchain concept to different problems in aviation industry. It will discuss and highlight the specific approaches that leverages blockchain to mitigate the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) security issues. Furthermore, it introduces an innovative design and method to secure ADS-B data using a tamper-resistant distributed public ledger of authenticated flight plans and validates the position and other parameters of the associated aircraft identifier against the flight paths/routes that are stored in the blockchain ledger.Design/methodology/approachADS-B is the key technology that is mandated by Federal Aviation Administration in USA by 2020. However, ADS-B data is neither encrypted nor authenticated. This paper proposes a novel solution using blockchain to secure the ADS-B data communications and in-depth analysis of existing solutions covering the following aspects: classification of various possible attacks on ADS-B. Presents various solutions proposed by different researchers regarding use of blockchain in aviation industry. Discuss a new solution to secure ADS-B using blockchain. Discuss the high-level architectural framework of the proposed and patented solution. Finally, presents the conclusions and future work scope.FindingsWhile the main intention of this paper is to bring together all the existing solutions using blockchain to secure aviation and ADS-B data at one place, the proposed novel solution could contribute to maintaining security and privacy for aircrafts flying in the airspace at any point in time. Continuously securing the ADS-B data transmissions based upon the filed flight plans in real time can provide a mechanism to identify spoofed aircraft messages and communicate the same to ground stations for authentication of existence of such a malicious aircraft. Thus, this solution also differs from all the existing ones.Practical implicationsAs aviation industry is in its infancy stage in implementing blockchain-based solutions, practical implementation of the proposed concept might take longer.Originality/valueThis paper is a comprehensive survey and review paper. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first of its kind that presents various use cases for usage of blockchain in aviation industry along with a detailed review of existing proposed or implemented solutions using blockchain to secure ADS-B data. This can serve as an invaluable reference for the future researchers on this topic in both industry and academia.