How to protect ADS-B: Confidentiality framework for future air traffic communication

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADSB) is one of the crucial technologies for future “e-Enabled” aircrafts. Basically, ADS-B uses avionics in the e-Enabled aircrafts to broadcast essential flight data such as the aircraft call sign, altitude, heading, and other extra positioning information. On one hand ADS-B brings significant benefits to the aviation industry, but on the other hand it could pose some security concern as channels between ground controllers and aircrafts for ADS-B communications are not secured and the ADS-B messages could be captured by random individuals who might own ADS-B receivers. For certain situations, those ADS-B data can be very critical, especially when communications occur among military and mission-critical civil airplanes. These communications need to be protected from any interruption and eavesdropping. The challenge here is to construct an encryption scheme fast enough for very frequent encryption and flexible enough for effective key management. To address these issues, we propose a Staged Identity Based Encryption (SIBE) scheme, which is an extended version of hybrid Identity-Based Encryption. Based on the the proposed SIBE scheme, we introduce a new confidentiality framework for future e-Enabled aircrafts with ADS-B capability.