Cyber Threat Impact Analysis to Air Traffic Flows Through Dynamic Queue Networks

Abstract

Air traffic control increasingly depends on information and communication technology (ICT) to manage traffic flow through highly congested and increasingly interdependent airspace regions. While these systems are critical to ensuring the efficiency and safety of our airspace, they are also increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats that could potentially lead to reduction in capacity and/or reorganization of traffic flows. In this paper, we model various cyber threats to air traffic control systems, and analyze how these attacks could impact the flow of aircraft through the airspace. To perform this analysis, we consider a model for wide-area air traffic based on a dynamic queuing network model. Then we introduce three different attacks (Route Denial of Service, Route Selection Tampering, and Sector Denial of Service) to the air traffic control system, and explore how these attacks manipulate the sector flows by evaluating the queue backlogs for each sector's outflows. Furthermore, we then explore graph-level vulnerability metrics to identify the sectors that are most vulnerable to various flow manipulations, and compare them to case-study simulations of the various attacks. The results suggest that Route Denial of Service attacks have a significant impact on the target sector and lead to the largest degradation to the overall air traffic flows. Furthermore, the impact of Sector Denial of Service attack impacts are primarily confined to the target sector, while the Route Selection Tampering impacts are mostly confined to certain aircraft.

Mitigation of ADS-B Spoofing Attack Impact on Departure Sequencing Through Modulated Synchronous Taxiing Approach

“…Considering the criticality of possible impacts that can be caused by ghost aircraft spoofing attacks, we adopted the primary criteria of our attack scenario based on the tangible impacts analyzed in [36] to the Arrival-Ground Movement-Departure (AGMOD) operations and also in [37] that probed impact to en-route aircraft. In another study on tactical flight diversion for mitigating risks of ADS-B ghost aircraft spoofing done by us recently [38], we refined the criteria which are:…”

“…CAAM is of the opinion that the right combination of number and frequency will determine the impact and looks more real. The direct impact to the ATM are duration of flight delays and number of affected real aircraft, as demonstrated by [37]. Fig.…”

“…The ATM would be full of uncertainties that requires impromptu decision making. As [37] has modeled the ATC's response and the cascading effects that have occurred, movements on the ground were limited to arrivals and taxiing-in while pushback, taxiingout and takeoff were put on hold. This particular incident is actually directly caused by the degradation of other surveillance systems such as radar failure.…”

‘Out Beyond Jointery’: Developing a Model for Gaming Multi-Domain Warfare

“…We know that the SCADA systems which control much of our critical national infrastructure are hugely vulnerable to cyber attack (Shaw 2004;Yadav and Paul 2019;Trend Micro 2019). Any IT-controlled system is potentially vulnerable to attack and disruption, with potentially catastrophic results; consider for example the likely outcome of a coordinated series of attacks on the air traffic control systems at major airports (Tamimi, Hahn, and Roy. 2020;Hird 2020).…”