A preliminary effort toward investigating the impacts of ADS-B message injection attack

Manesh, Mohsen Riahi; Mullins, Michael; Foerster, Kyle; Kaabouch, Naima

doi:10.1109/aero.2018.8396610

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…They concluded that critical air traffic management decision processes should not rely on ADS-Bderived data without appropriate countermeasures. Manesh et al [20] investigated the impacts of ADS-B message injection attacks. In their simulation experiment, they tested the Piccolo autopilot's response to ghost aircraft injection.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cybersecurity Attacks on Software Logic and Error Handling Within ADS-B Implementations: Systematic Testing of Resilience and Countermeasures

Khandker¹,

Turtiainen²,

Costin³

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is a cornerstone of the next-generation digital sky and is now mandated in several countries. However, there have been many reports of serious security vulnerabilities in the ADS-B architecture. In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate the impact of multiple cyberattacks on ADS-B via remote radio frequency links that affected various network, processing, and display subsystems used within the ADS-B ecosystem.Overall we implemented and tested 12 cyberattacks on ADS-B in a controlled environment, out of which 5 attacks were presented or implemented for the first time. For all these attacks, we developed a unique testbed that consisted of 13 hardware devices and 22 software that ran on Android, iOS, Linux, and Windows operating systems, which result in a total of 36 tested configurations. Each of the attacks was successful on various subsets of the tested configurations. In some attacks, we discovered wide qualitative variations and discrepancies in how particular configurations react to and treat ADS-B inputs that contain errors or contradicting flight information, with the main culprit almost always being the software implementation. In some other attacks, we managed to cause Denial of Service (DoS) by remotely crashing/impacting more than 50% of the test-set that corresponded to those attacks.Besides demonstrating successful attacks, we also implemented, investigated, and report herein some practical countermeasures to these attacks. We demonstrated that the strong relationship between the received signal strength and the distance-toemitter might help verify the aircraft's advertised ADS-B position and distance. For example, our best machine learning models achieved 90% accuracy in detecting spoofed ADS-B signals, which may be effectively used to distinguish ADS-B signals of real aircraft from spoofed signals of attackers.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cybersecurity Attacks on Software Logic and Error Handling Within ADS-B Implementations: Systematic Testing of Resilience and Countermeasures

Khandker¹,

Turtiainen²,

Costin³

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…They stated that ADS-B exploitation could cause disastrous consequences, confusion, aircraft groundings, and in the worst case even plane crashes. Manesh et al [22] used Piccolo autopilot and a portable ground station to observe the autopilot's ghost aircraft injection response. They injected fake ADS-B messages causing ghost aircraft to appear in the vicinity of the Piccolo autopilot (ownership).…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the (In)Security of 1090ES and UAT978 Mobile Cockpit Information Systems–An Attacker Perspective on the Availability of ADS-B Safety- and Mission-Critical Systems

Khandker¹,

Turtiainen²,

Costin³

et al. 2022

IEEE Access

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is a key air surveillance technology and a critical component of next-generation air transportation systems. It significantly simplifies aircraft surveillance technology and improves airborne traffic situational awareness. Many types of mobile cockpit information systems (MCISs) are based on ADS-B technology. MCIS gives pilots the flight and trafficrelated information they need. MCIS has two parts: an ADS-B transceiver and an electronic flight bag (EFB) application. The ADS-B transceivers transmit and receive the ADS-B radio signals while the EFB applications hosted on mobile phones display the data. Because they are cheap, lightweight, and easy to install, MCISs became very popular. However, due to the lack of basic security measures, ADS-B technology is vulnerable to cyberattacks, which makes the MCIS inherently exposed to attacks. Attacks are even more likely for the MCIS, because they are power, memory, and computationally constrained. This study explores the cybersecurity posture of various MCIS setups for both types of ADS-B technology: 1090ES and UAT978. Total six portable MCIS devices and 21 EFB applications were tested against radio-link-based attacks by transmission-capable software-defined radio (SDR). Packet-level denial of service (DoS) attacks affected approximately 63% and 37% of 1090ES and UAT978 setups, respectively, while many of them experienced a system crash. Our experiments show that DoS attacks on the reception could meaningfully reduce transmission capacity. Our coordinated attack and fuzz tests also reported worrying issues on the MCIS. The consistency of our results on a very broad range of hardware and software configurations indicate the reliability of our proposed methodology as well as the effectiveness and efficiency of our platform.

show abstract

“…Other studies focused on how pilots and autopilots react to such misleading information an aircraft receives. Therefore, Manesh et al [17] investigated how an injection attack could impact ADS-B messages; their main focus was testing how the autopilot responds to ghost aircraft injection. This type of attack shows an immediate and unexpected appearance of an aircraft (ghost aircraft) close to the responding aircraft.…”

Section: Ads-b and Ads-b Vulnerabilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Secure Aviation Control through a Streamlined ADS-B Perception System

Abu Al-Haija,

Al-Tamimi

2024

ASI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is the future of aviation surveillance and traffic control, allowing different aircraft types to exchange information periodically. Despite this protocol’s advantages, it is vulnerable to flooding, denial of service, and injection attacks. In this paper, we decided to join the initiative of securing this protocol and propose an efficient detection method to help detect any exploitation attempts by injecting these messages with the wrong information. This paper focused mainly on three attacks: path modification, ghost aircraft injection, and velocity drift attacks. This paper aims to provide a revolutionary methodology that, even in the face of new attacks (zero-day attacks), can successfully detect injected messages. The main advantage was utilizing a recent dataset to create more reliable and adaptive training and testing materials, which were then preprocessed before using different machine learning algorithms to feasibly create the most accurate and time-efficient model. The best outcomes of the binary classification were obtained with 99.14% accuracy, an F1-score of 99.14%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.982. At the same time, the best outcomes of the multiclass classification were obtained with 99.41% accuracy, an F1-score of 99.37%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.988. Eventually, our best outcomes outdo existing models, but we believe the model would benefit from more testing of other types of attacks and a bigger dataset.

show abstract

A preliminary effort toward investigating the impacts of ADS-B message injection attack

Cited by 12 publications

References 9 publications

Cybersecurity Attacks on Software Logic and Error Handling Within ADS-B Implementations: Systematic Testing of Resilience and Countermeasures

Cybersecurity Attacks on Software Logic and Error Handling Within ADS-B Implementations: Systematic Testing of Resilience and Countermeasures

On the (In)Security of 1090ES and UAT978 Mobile Cockpit Information Systems–An Attacker Perspective on the Availability of ADS-B Safety- and Mission-Critical Systems

Secure Aviation Control through a Streamlined ADS-B Perception System

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About