skip to main content
10.1145/2732198.2732202acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesasia-ccsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Lightweight Location Verification in Air Traffic Surveillance Networks

Published: 14 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

In this work, we develop a realistic threat model for attacks on modern air traffic communication networks and show that current state-of-the-art countermeasures such as multilateration are insufficient. We propose two alternatives, a statistical location verification technique and a grid-based location estimation approach, to deal with the identified threats. We evaluate our proposals using real-world flight data and quantify their effectiveness in terms of aircraft location accuracy, resilience to message injection attacks, attack detection speed, and surveillance coverage.
Our results show that the statistical verification approach can increase the effective air traffic surveillance coverage compared to multilateration by a factor of more than 100. Concerning our location estimation method, we find that the mean aircraft location accuracy can be increased by up to 41% in comparison with multilateration while also being able to pinpoint ground-based attackers with a mean error of 145m for air-based attackers. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposal is lightweight as it does not require any changes to the existing air traffic protocols and transmitters, and is easily implemented using only low-cost hardware.

References

[1]
L. Vidal, "ADS-B Out and In - Airbus Status," ADS-B Taskforce - KOLKATA, Apr. 2013.
[2]
A. A. Cardenas, S. Amin, Z.-S. Lin, Y.-L. Huang, C.-Y. Huang, and S. Sastry, "Attacks against process control systems: risk assessment, detection, and response," in Proceedings of the 6th ACM symposium on information, computer and communications security. ACM, 2011, pp. 355--366.
[3]
D.-Y. Yu, A. Ranganathan, T. Locher, S. Capkun, and D. Basin, "Detection of GPS spoofing attacks in power grids," in Proc. of the 2014 ACM conference on Security and privacy in wireless & mobile networks. ACM, 2014.
[4]
A. Costin and A. Francillon, "Ghost in the Air (Traffic): On insecurity of ADS-B protocol and practical attacks on ADS-B devices," in Black Hat USA, 2012.
[5]
R. Kunkel, "Air traffic control insecurity 2.0," in DefCon 18, 2010.
[6]
M. Schäfer, V. Lenders, and I. Martinovic, "Experimental analysis of attacks on next generation air traffic communication," in Applied Cryptography and Network Security, ser. LNCS, no. 7954. Springer, Jun. 2013.
[7]
ICAO, "Cyber Security for Civil Aviation," in Twelfth Air Navigation Conference, 2012, pp. 1--4.
[8]
M. Clayton. (2014, Mar.) Malaysia airlines ight mh370: Are planes vulnerable to cyber-attack? Christian Science Monitor.
[9]
M. Strohmeier, V. Lenders, and I. Martinovic, "Security of ADS-B: State of the Art and Beyond," arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.3664, Jul. 2013.
[10]
D. McCallie, J. Butts, and R. Mills, "Security analysis of the ADS-B implementation in the next generation air transportation system," International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 78--87, Aug. 2011.
[11]
L. Purton, H. Abbass, and S. Alam, "Identification of ADS-B System Vulnerabilities and Threats," in Australian Transport Research Forum, Canberra, 2010.
[12]
A. Proano and L. Lazos, "Selective jamming attacks in wireless networks," in Communications (ICC), 2010 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2010.
[13]
M. Strohmeier, M. Schäfer, V. Lenders, and I. Martinovic, "Realities and Challenges of NextGen Air Traffic Management: The Case of ADS-B," Communications Magazine, IEEE, vol. 52, no. 5, May 2014.
[14]
ICAO, "Guidance Material: Security issues associated with ADS-B," Tech. Rep., 2014.
[15]
A. Smith, R. Cassell, T. Breen, R. Hulstrom, and C. Evers, "Methods to Provide System-wide ADS-B Back-Up, Validation and Security," in 25th Digital Avionics Systems Conf., 2006.
[16]
ICAO, "Guidance Material on Comparison of Surveillance Technologies (GMST)," Tech. Rep. September, 2007.
[17]
M. Gariel and E. Feron, "Graceful degradation of air traffic operations: airspace sensitivity to degraded surveillance systems," Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 96, no. 12, 2008.
[18]
K. D. Wesson, T. E. Humphreys, and B. L. Evans, "Can cryptography secure next generation air traffic surveillance?" IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, 2014.
[19]
A. Greenberg. (2012, Jul.) Next-gen air traffic control vulnerable to hackers spoofing planes out of thin air. Forbes.
[20]
K. Zetter. (2012, Jul.) Air traffic controllers pick the wrong week to quit using radar. Wired.
[21]
B. Haines, "Hacker + airplanes = no good can come of this," in Confidence X, 2012.
[22]
B. Kovell, B. Mellish, T. Newman, and O. Kajopaiye, "Comparative Analysis of ADS-B Verification Tech." 2012.
[23]
K. Sampigethaya and R. Poovendran, "Security and privacy of future aircraft wireless communications with offboard systems," in 2011 Third International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2011). IEEE, 2011.
[24]
B. Nuseibeh, C. B. Haley, and C. Foster, "Securing the Skies: In Requirements We Trust," Computer, vol. 42, no. 9, 2009.
[25]
I. A. Mantilla-Gaviria, M. Leonardi, G. Galati, and J. V. Balbastre-Tejedor, "Localization algorithms for multilateration (MLAT) systems in airport surface surveillance," Signal, Im. and Video Processing, 2014.
[26]
W. W. Li and P. Kamal, "Integrated Aviation Security for Defense-in-Depth of Next Generation Air Transportation System," in IEEE Conf. on Tech. for Homeland Sec., 2011.
[27]
M. Schäfer, V. Lenders, and I. Martinovic, "Experimental Analysis of Attacks on Next Generation Air Traffic Communication," in Applied Cryptography and Network Security. Springer, 2013, pp. 253--271.
[28]
C. Finke, J. Butts, R. Mills, and M. Grimaila, "Enhancing the security of aircraft surveillance in the next generation air traffic control system," International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 3--11, Mar. 2013.
[29]
K. Sampigethaya and L. Bushnell, "A Framework for Securing Future e-Enabled Aircraft Navigation and Surveillance," in AIAA Proceedings, 2009, pp. 1--10.
[30]
E. Chan-Tin, V. Heorhiadi, N. Hopper, and Y. Kim, "The Frog-Boiling Attack: Limitations of Secure Network Coordinate Systems," ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), vol. 14, no. 3, p. 27, 2011.
[31]
RTCA Inc., "Minimum Operational Performance Standards for 1090 MHz Extended Squitter Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) and Traffic Information Services - Broadcast (TIS-B)," DO-260B with Corrig. 1, 2011.
[32]
N. J. Gomes, P. P. Monteiro, and A. Gameiro, Next generation wireless communications using radio over fiber. Wiley, 2012.
[33]
M. Mosavi and H. Azami, "Applying Neural Network Ensembles for Clustering of GPS Satellites." International Journal of Geoinformatics, vol. 7, no. 3, 2011.
[34]
G. Galati, M. Leonardi, P. Magarò, and V. Paciucci, "Wide area surveillance using SSR mode S multilateration: advantages and limitations," in European Radar Conference (EURAD), 2005.
[35]
N. O. Tippenhauer, C. Pöpper, K. B. Rasmussen, and S. Capkun, "On the requirements for successful GPS spoofing attacks," in Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM, 2011.
[36]
W. Y. Poe, "Design problems in large-scale, time-sensitive wsns," Ph.D. dissertation, TU Kaiserslautern, Germany, 2013.
[37]
H. Liu, H. Darabi, P. Banerjee, and J. Liu, "Survey of wireless indoor positioning techniques and systems," Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 37, no. 6, 2007.
[38]
P. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan, "RADAR: An in-building RF-based user location and tracking system," in INFOCOM 2000. 19th Annual Joint Conf. of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Proceedings. IEEE, vol. 2, 2000.
[39]
A. Rozyyev, H. Hasbullah, and F. Subhan, "Combined K-Nearest Neighbors and Fuzzy Logic Indoor Localization Technique for Wireless Sensor Network," Research Journal of Inform. Tech., vol. 4, no. 4, 2012.
[40]
M. Schäfer, M. Strohmeier, V. Lenders, I. Martinovic, and M. Wilhelm, "Bringing Up OpenSky: A Large-scale ADS-B Sensor Network for Research," in ACM/IEEE International Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2014.
[41]
A. Jafarnia-Jahromi, A. Broumandan, J. Nielsen, and G. Lachapelle, "GPS vulnerability to spoofing threats and a review of antispoofing techniques," International Journal of Navigation and Observation, 2012.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Secure Aviation Control through a Streamlined ADS-B Perception SystemApplied System Innovation10.3390/asi70200277:2(27)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2024
  • (2024)One Class to Test Them All: One-Class Classifier-Based ADS-B Location Spoofing DetectionApplied Cryptography and Network Security Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-61489-7_4(55-74)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
  • (2023)LoVe is in the Air - Location Verification of ADS-B Signals using Distributed Public SensorsICC 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC45041.2023.10278848(6040-6045)Online publication date: 28-May-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Lightweight Location Verification in Air Traffic Surveillance Networks

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CPSS '15: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Cyber-Physical System Security
    April 2015
    116 pages
    ISBN:9781450334488
    DOI:10.1145/2732198
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 14 April 2015

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. ads-b
    2. air traffic control
    3. air traffic security
    4. aircraft localization
    5. location verification

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    ASIA CCS '15
    Sponsor:
    ASIA CCS '15: 10th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security
    April 14 - March 14, 2015
    Singapore, Republic of Singapore

    Acceptance Rates

    CPSS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 26 submissions, 35%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 43 of 135 submissions, 32%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)16
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
    Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Secure Aviation Control through a Streamlined ADS-B Perception SystemApplied System Innovation10.3390/asi70200277:2(27)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2024
    • (2024)One Class to Test Them All: One-Class Classifier-Based ADS-B Location Spoofing DetectionApplied Cryptography and Network Security Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-61489-7_4(55-74)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
    • (2023)LoVe is in the Air - Location Verification of ADS-B Signals using Distributed Public SensorsICC 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC45041.2023.10278848(6040-6045)Online publication date: 28-May-2023
    • (2022)Improvement in RSSI-Based Distance Estimation for Aircraft ADS-B Signal by Antenna DiversityProceedings of the Multimedia University Engineering Conference (MECON 2022)10.2991/978-94-6463-082-4_31(358-366)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2022
    • (2022)Analyzing Sequences of Airspace States to Detect Anomalous Traffic ConditionsIEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems10.1109/TAES.2021.312419958:3(1843-1857)Online publication date: Jun-2022
    • (2022)TDOA-based Position Verification of ADS-B Information Using a Sensor Network2022 Sensor Data Fusion: Trends, Solutions, Applications (SDF)10.1109/SDF55338.2022.9931704(1-6)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Comparison of ADS-B Verification Methods: Direct TDOA and MLATIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.320494310(97276-97288)Online publication date: 2022
    • (2022)Physical layer protection for ADS-B against spoofing and jammingInternational Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection10.1016/j.ijcip.2022.10055538:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2022
    • (2022)Aircraft Location VerificationSecure Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Systems10.1007/978-3-031-07021-1_4(85-115)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2022
    • (2021)A Review on Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities for Urban Air MobilityAIAA Scitech 2021 Forum10.2514/6.2021-0773Online publication date: 4-Jan-2021
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media