Comparative Analysis of ADS-B Verification Techniques

ADS-B is one of many Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulated technologies used to monitor air traffic with high precision, while reducing dependencies on dated and costly radar equipment [1]. The FAA hopes to decrease the separation between aircraft, reduce risk of collision as air traffic density increases, save fuel costs, and increase situational awareness of both commercial and general aviation aircraft within United States airspace. Several aviation technology experts have expressed concern over the security of the ADS-B protocol [2] [3]. ADS-B has an open and well known data format, which is broadcast on known frequencies. This means that the protocol is highly susceptible to radio frequency (RF) attacks such as eavesdropping, jamming, and spoofing. Eavesdropping and jamming will be reviewed in Section 3.4. While eavesdropping and jamming attacks are well studied, due to their applicability in many radio technologies, spoofing attacks against ADS-B are particular to this system. As such, the latter is the focus of our research. This paper evaluates so-called Kalman Filtering and Group Validation techniques (described below) in order to assess which would be a better position verification method of ADS-B signals. The parameters for the comparative analysis include both technical feasibility and practical implementation of each position verification technique. The goal is to offer a practical position verification process which could be implemented with limited government funding within the next 10 years.

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