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

Abstract

Apart from delay to flight arrivals, occurrence of ghost aircraft from ADS-B message injection attack will also cause delay to the departure operations. Moreover, if attacks are designed meticulously, departure operations can suffer substantially with extensive flight delays and cancellations. To mitigate this incident, we propose a custom method for taxiing-out which encompasses three key components. First is by establishing situational awareness based on pivotal information about the taxiway and spoofing conditions. Next is application of dedicated algorithms to quickly capitalize available time to initiate aircraft clusters taxiing-out after temporal suspension. Lastly is the function to alternately switching clusters to recommence taxiing-out depending on changes in spoofing pattern. We simulated our proposed ‘Modulated Synchronous Taxiing Approach’ under several attack scenarios coupled with various taxiing-out schedules using a specially built discrete events model. Through a model that is formed based on integrated queues driven by a taxiing-out algorithm, experiment results show that our proposed approach fares better than other conventional taxiing-out approaches with more aircraft managed to get into the runway or closer to the runway. Overall, our proposed approach enhances departure operations resiliency whilst constantly maintaining safety first principle as the utmost priority amid uncertainties caused by cyberattack.

Keywords

• ADS-B
• cyber attack
• ghost aircraft spoofing
• air traffic control
• impact mitigation
• synchronous taxiing