LHCSAS: A Lightweight and Highly-Compatible
Solution for ADS-B Security
Haomiao Yang
∗
, Mingxuan Yao
†
, Zili Xu
‡
and Baoshu Liu
§
∗
School of Computer Science and Engineering & Center for Cyber Security
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
†
Georgia Institute of Technology
Email:
∗
haomyang@uestc.edu.cn
†
myao42@gatech.edu
‡§
The Second Research Institute, CAAC
Email:
‡
zxuzili@caacsri.com
§
liubaoshu@caacsri.com
Abstract—Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast
(ADS-B), as the key component of next-generation air transporta-
tion system, becomes the replacement of secondary surveillance
radar (SSR) since it will improve air traffic control by requiring
the aircraft periodically broadcast its geographical information.
But the obstacle blocking the deployment of the promising ADS-
B belongs to security concerns where ADS-B messages are all
transmitted in the clear and can be forged and modified easily.
The already proposals for ADS-B security refer to the privacy or
integrity unilaterally, and all require the modification of existing
ADS-B protocols. In this paper, we design ingeniously a solution
for ADS-B security, by integrating carefully some recent specific
crypto primitives, and then modifying properly them to adapt to
ADS-B features. Compared with previous methods, our solution
is at the same time (1) lightweight for resource-constraint avionics
devices and already congested data links, (2) highly-compatible
to existing ADS-B protocols and (3) tolerating package loss
commonly occurring in ADS-B broadcast data links. This makes
our solution particularly practical and easy-deploying. Security
analysis indicates that our solution can achieve confidentiality and
integrity of ADS-B messages, also performance evaluation, based
on the real-world ADS-B data, proves efficiency of our solution
from cost of computation and communication. Furthermore, the
deployment on a real airport environment demonstrates high
compatibility of our solution.
I. INTRODUCTION
The automatic dependent surveillance broadcast (ADS-B),
as a replacement of the traditional secondary surveillance radar
(SSR), is a backbone of next-generation air transportation
system [1], requiring the aircraft to periodically broadcast its
position, identity, velocity, etc.
The surveillance technology of ADS-B can enhance air
traffic monitoring, and thus improve flight safety, in which air-
crafts continually broadcast their positions obtained from the
global positioning system (GPS) or other satellite navigations,
therefore it has a wider coverage area of surveillance (Fig.
1). While in SSR, the aircraft can only be detected within
the radar coverage area, more and more cases of airborne
disappearance occur at sea which is usually out of the coverage
of the radar system, e.g. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 [2]. As
a result, the EUROCONTROL has specified the mandatory
deployment of ADS-B for entire new aircraft in the European
Union by 2015 [3] while the Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) has mandated ADS-B in the US airspace by 2020 [4].
Although ADS-B may optimize flight safety margins, ADS-
B, surprisingly, has been designed without security in mind.
ADS-B messages are all broadcast without encryption and
authentication rendering the ADS-B systems susceptible to
a number of malicious attacks. It is easy to compromise
the security of ADS-B with the off-the-shelf software and
hardware. For instance, Plane Finder AR is a mobile applica-
tion providing any aircraft flight information including flight
number, heading and so on all in real time. Also, at the Black
Hat USA 2012, the hacker Haines demonstrated the ease of
spoofing or inserting a fake aircraft into the monitoring screen
of the air traffic controller (ATC), only if equipped with a
cheap ADS-B transponder [5].
Some means of cryptography have been proposed to resist
the known attacks aiming at ADS-B. However, traditional
cryptographic methods cannot simply be applied to protect the
security of ADS-B. The encryption of the ADS-B message
is to defend the passive eavesdropping attack [6]. Simply
encrypting the whole ADS-B message, however, disobeys
the openness of ADS-B system. For example, considering
the operational requirement and flight safety, FAA claims
plaintext data links are necessary [7]. Therefore, implementing
encryption without impacting safety is a challenge problem.
Apart from that, to resist the active injection attack, some
schemes exploit asymmetric cryptographic approaches (e.g.
digital signatures [8]) against the forging and modifying of
ADS-B messages, which brings the huge computation and
communication overhead. Especially, the already proposals for
ADS-B security refer to the privacy or integrity unilaterally
requiring the modification of existing ADS-B protocols, which
violates the compatibility to result in the obstacle of deploying.
In addition, avionics devices are generally constrained in
terms of processing capability, and ADS-B data links, whether
ES1090 [9] or UAT [10], are both low-bandwidth. As a result,
existing schemes are not suitable to deploy in large-scale
ADS-B environment. A practical and effective cryptographic
solution, regarding the security, performance and compatibility
978-1-5090-5019-2/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE