Lightweight Location Verification in Air Traffic Surveillance Networks

Abstract

In this work, we develop a realistic threat model for attacks on modern air traffic communication networks and show that current state-of-the-art countermeasures such as multilateration are insufficient. We propose two alternatives, a statistical location verification technique and a grid-based location estimation approach, to deal with the identified threats. We evaluate our proposals using real-world flight data and quantify their effectiveness in terms of aircraft location accuracy, resilience to message injection attacks, attack detection speed, and surveillance coverage.