Cyber Security in Air Traffic Control

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

1.1 Domain Overview

Cyber security is the application of technologies, processes and controls to protect
systems, network, program, devices and data from cyber attack. It aims to reduce the risk of
cyber exploitation of systems, network and technologies. Cyber security is important because
it protects all categories of data from theft and damages. This includes sensitive data,
personally identifiable information, personal information. Air traffic control (ATC) is a
service provided by ground – based air traffic controllers who direct aircraft on the ground
and through a given section of controlled airspace and can provide advisory services to
aircraft in non – controlled airspace. Air Traffic Control to move aircraft safety and
efficiently through the airspace system. Air Traffic Controllers monitor the location id
aircraft in their assigned airspace by radar and communicate with the pilots by radio.
1.2 Project and Application overview
Extensive experiments based on real flight data demonstrate the high performance of the
proposed approaches, suitable for the deployment in practical real-world aviation system.
ATC towers systems and equipment, and surveillance systems, air traffic systems design,
radar surveillance systems and holographic radars.
 Surface movement and surveillance radars.
 Holographic radar.
 Navigation and surveillance systems.
 Voice communication control systems.
1.3 Existing System
 Existing schemes of key exchange are not appropriate for deployment in large-scale,
distributed and dynamic environments of ADS-B.
 Jamming attacks are also one of the major vulnerabilities of automatic dependent
surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) systems.

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1.4 Disadvantages of Existing system

 With respect to processing capability, avionics are usually resource constrained and
ADS-B communication channels are both congested with low bandwidth.
 A jammer can make an authentic aircraft unsuccessful in sending or receiving ADS-
B messages.
 A constant jammer emits continues high power spurious signals without following
any protocol.
 This type of jammer can be broken down to constant jamming and message injection
attacks.
1.5 Problem Statement

In this section, we formalize the system model, present a realistic threat model by
identifying various kinds of attacks, and define our design goals. System model .As
illustrated in Fig.1, our system model is abstracted from key components of general ADS-B
systems, where aircraft determine their own positional information obtained from the global
navigation satellite system such as GPS. Transponders continuously broadcast ADS-B
messages, including position, velocity, intent etc.

Fig.1: System model under consideration

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1.6 Proposed System

Proposed a solution based on a multichannel coherent receiver against the ADS-B
receiver jamming attack. In particular, they proposed to use algebraic manipulation via
singular value decomposition to generate different signal subspaces corresponding to
different sources, one of which is the jammer to be counteracted.

1.7 Advantages of Proposed System

 Increase the reliability of the unmanned aerial system (UAS) networks and mitigate
the effect of jamming attacks on these systems.
 Analyze formally the security of our schemes, comprehensively achieving the
confidentiality and authenticity.
 Performance evaluation of approaches by conducting simulations in
embedded devices and desktop computers respectively.

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CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE SURVEY

2.1 Literature Review

 Performance Comparison of Machine Learning Algorithm in Detecting Jamming

Attacks on ADS-B Devices Mohsen Riahi Manesh(2019). Provider a performance
comparison of machine learning-based methods for detecting jamming attacks on ADS-
B receivers.
 A Practical and Compatible Cryptographic Solution to ADS-B Security Haomio
Yang(2018). The use of the FFX encryption and reserved ADS-B messages can
guarantee the compatibility of solution with existing ADS-B protocols.

2.2 Conclusion of Review

 Addressed security issues for the real ADS-B system and presented a complete
cryptographic solution to comprehensively ensure the privacy and integrity of ADS-B
messages.
 Establishing more security for the wireless communication.
 Detecting cyber attacks and ensuring security.
 Tracking location of the aircraft.
 Detecting jamming attack.

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CHAPTER 3

SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

3.1 Introduction to system Development

ADS-B, which consists of two different services, "ADS-B Out" and "ADS-B In", could
replace radar as the primary surveillance method for controlling aircraft. ADS-B is an integral
component of the Next-Gen national airspace strategy for upgrading and enhancing aviation
infrastructure and operations, the ADS-B system can provide traffic and government-generated
graphical weather information at no cost through TISB and FIS-B applications. ADS-B enhances
safety by making an aircraft visible, real-time, to air traffic control (ATC) and to other
appropriately equipped ADS-B aircraft with position and velocity data transmitted every second.
ADS-B data can be recorded and downloaded for post-flight analysis. ADS-B also provides the
data infrastructure for inexpensive flight tracking, planning, and dispatch.

Using "ADS-B Out", each aircraft periodically broadcasts information about itself, such
as identification, current position, altitude and velocity, through an onboard transmitter. ADS-B
Out provides air traffic controllers with real-time position information that is, in most cases,
more accurate than the information available with current radar-based systems. With more
accurate information, ATC will be able to position and separate aircraft with improved precision
and timing.

"ADS-B In" is the reception by aircraft of FIS-B and TIS-B data and other ADS-B data
such as direct communication from nearby aircraft. The ground station broadcast data is typically
only made available in the presence of an ADS-B Out broadcasting aircraft, limiting the
usefulness of purely ADS-B In devices.

3.2 Modules and Methodologies

To build a training dataset we simulated the transmission of ADS-B messages from a transmitter
to a receiver, as shown in Fig. 2.

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Fig.2: Block diagram of the ADS-B transmission simulation

The dataset is composed of a high number of received ADSB messages from which a
number of features are extracted. The dataset is built in the presence and absence of the jamming
signals to account for the fake and legitimate portions of the dataset.

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CHAPTER 4

SYSTEM DESIGN

4.1 Introduction to System Design

The purpose of the design phase is to plan a solution of the problem specified by the
requirements document. This phase is the first step in moving from the problem domain to the
solution domain. The design of a system is perhaps the most critical factor affecting the quality
of the software; it has a major impact on the later phases particularly testing and maintenance.
The design activity often results in three separate outputs –

 Architecture design.
 High level design.
 Detailed design.

Architecture Design:

Architecture focuses on looking at a system as a combination of many different

components, and how they interact with each other to produce the desired result. The focus is on
identifying components or subsystems and how they connect. In other words, the focus is on
what major components are needed.

High Level Design:

In high level design identifies the modules that should be built for developing the system
and the specifications of these modules. At the end of system design all major data structures,
file format, output formats, etc., are also fixed. The focus is on identifying the modules. In other
words, the attention is on what modules are needed.

Detailed Design:

In the detailed design the internal logic of each of the modules is specified. The focus is
on designing the logic for each of the modules. In other words how modules can be implemented

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in software is the issue. A design methodology is a systematic approach to creating a design by

application of a set of techniques and guidelines. Most methodologies focus on high level design.

4.2 System Architecture

The proposed system architecture is designed based on working of a Artificial Neural

Networks, Neural networks are networks of nodes (neurons) that are connected using trained
weights. The input nodes are the features. The output node for binary classification could be one
node in which is either near 1 or near 0. The other nodes are placed in the hidden layers, number
of which can vary. Generally, all input nodes have a connection to the next layers. A set of
training examples is given as input. For each training example, the network is fed with the input
features, x, from ADS-B message.

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CHAPTER 5

SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION

5.1 Algorithm and Methodology

Logistic Regression: Logistic Regression is the method of classifying data into two
classes using a sigmoid (logistic) function, which is limited to values between 0 and 1. This
method typically states where the boundary between the classes exists and determines the class
probabilities. The classification is based on the use of one or several predictors.

Support Vector Machine: This algorithm calculates the similarity between the trained data
and new data. Different similarity kernels can be used. In binary classification problems, SVM
divides the data into two classes by making a hyper plane between the data. SVM aims to
maximize the distance of this hyper plane with the data classes to separate the data.

k-Nearest Neighbor: The kNN algorithm works by looking at the nearest trained dataset
points to the new data point [28]. It uses the idea that the points with similar properties stay in
close proximity of each other.

Decision Tree: This algorithm is composed of a tree in which each node represents a feature
and each leaf denotes an outcome. The connections of the input nodes and the resulted outcomes
are done via tree branches.

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CHAPTER 6

RESULT AND DISCUSSIONS

The goal is to maximize the accuracy and probability of detection while minimizing the
probability of false alarm. The accuracy of the kNN algorithm as a function of the number of
neighbors when different distance metrics are used. The distance is calculated using three
methods: Euclidean, Chebyshev, and Mahalanobis. The number of neighbors analyzed range
from 1 to 40. After a certain number of neighbors, the accuracy does not significantly change
when the number increases. Mahalanobis distance metric provides the best performance
compared to the other distance metrics and degrades the least overall as more neighbors are used
to calculate distances. With a number of neighbors equal to 1, the Mahalanobis distance
algorithm can achieve the highest accuracy.

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CONCLUSION

Introduction of the ADS-B protocol and communication systems as well as ADS-B

adaptation by virtually all aircraft manufacturers and airlines is one of the major innovations in
the field of air traffic control in the last decades. ADS-B offers more accurate methods of
communications and reporting between ground facilities and aircrafts. ADS-B improves both
the reliability of these channels allowing more flights to land and take off safely from each
airport and improves the safety of passengers. ADS-B provides pilots with real time data
and air traffic information allowing more accurate decision to be made. ADS-B can provide
more accurate data compared to PSR data provided air traffic controllers by using SSR.
Additionally, ADB-B can enhance the accuracy of the detection of aircraft positions due to
the higher resolution of air traffic information. However, the development and the specification
of ADS-B have dangerously ignored the risks of cyber-intrusion. The ADS-B designed have not
foreseen cyber threats and have not included the most trivial countermeasures, such as
authentication and encryption. The cyber threats, presented in this chapter, stress the need for
re-evaluation lack of security measures in the ADS-B technology and call for a provision of an
advanced technological solution that can maintains ADS-B benefits but prevents its malicious
exploitation.

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REFERENCES

[1] M. Riahi Manesh, and N. Kaabouch. "Analysis of vulnerabilities, attacks, countermeasures

and overall risk of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system."
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[2] M. Strohmeier, V. Lenders, and I. Martinovic. "On the security of the automatic dependent
surveillance-broadcast protocol." IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 17, no. 2, pp.
1066-1087, 2015.

[3] A. Costin and A. Francillon. "Ghost in the Air (Traffic): On insecurity of ADS-B protocol
and practical attacks on ADS-B devices." Black Hat USA, pp. 1-12, 2012.

[4] H. Reyes, Hector, N. Kaabouch, W. Semke, and S. Salle, "Fuzzy logic method for link loss
detection during unmanned aerial vehicle flights," In Infotech@ Aerospace, p. 2574. 2012.

[5] K. Grover, A. Lim, and Q. Yang, "Jamming and anti–jamming techniques in wireless
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[6]Johansson, Ronnie, Peter Hammar, and Patrik Thorén. "On simulation based adaptive UAS
behavior during jamming." In Research, Education and Development of Unmanned Aerial
Systems (RED-UAS), 2017 Workshop on, pp. 78-83. IEEE, 2017

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