RadArnomaly: Protecting Radar Systems from Data Manipulation Attacks

Abstract

Radar systems are mainly used for tracking aircraft, missiles, satellites, and watercraft. In many cases, information regarding the objects detected by a radar system is sent to, and used by, a peripheral consuming system, such as a missile system or a graphical user interface used by an operator. Those systems process the data stream and make real-time operational decisions based on the data received. Given this, the reliability and availability of information provided by radar systems have grown in importance. Although the field of cyber security has been continuously evolving, no prior research has focused on anomaly detection in radar systems. In this paper, we present an unsupervised deep-learning-based method for detecting anomalies in radar system data streams; we take into consideration the fact that a data stream created by a radar system is heterogeneous, i.e., it contains both numerical and categorical features with non-linear and complex relationships. We propose a novel technique that learns the correlation between numerical features and an embedding representation of categorical features in an unsupervised manner. The proposed technique, which allows for the detection of the malicious manipulation of critical fields in a data stream, is complemented by a timing-interval anomaly-detection mechanism proposed for the detection of message-dropping attempts. Real radar system data were used to evaluate the proposed method. Our experiments demonstrated the method’s high detection accuracy on a variety of data-stream manipulation attacks (an average detection rate of 88% with a false -alarm rate of 1.59%) and message-dropping attacks (an average detection rate of 92% with a false-alarm rate of 2.2%).

Attacking (and Defending) the Maritime Radar System

“…From a defense perspective, while the literature has already presented some anomaly detection solutions concerning acquisitions by secondary radars [50], [51], to the best of our knowledge no work addresses detection at the polar video level of primary radars.…”

dump1030: Open-Source Plug-and-Play Demodulator/Decoder for 1030 MHz Uplink

“…Cybersecurity and digital privacy aspects of Mode S and ADS-B are increasingly important topics, and recent works extensively addressed them concerning 1090MHz links and implementations [1]- [3], [30]. As 1030MHz Mode S and ADS-B are actively used by radar systems, several works studied the security issues in radar systems [28], [31], while some proposed protective mechanisms for data manipulation in radar systems [32]. However, the cybersecurity studies of the 1030MHz Mode S and ADS-B communications were not performed; therefore, we hope dump1030 can be instrumental for this, and we leave our study of this topic as future work.…”

Exploring Quantum Sensing Potential for Systems Applications

“…Even though the sensor must be relatively close to the ground to achieve good resolution, its sensitivity may enable new applications, such as rapidly clearing brownfield sites or searching for minerals. While the sensor head is remarkably sturdy compared to other devices, the necessary auxiliary hardware is still relatively large and complex [95]. As a result, we anticipate an increase in the number of applications for underground visibility that drives technological advancement, resulting in cost and size reductions.…”