Secure Aviation Control through a Streamlined ADS-B Perception System

Abstract

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is the future of aviation surveillance and traffic control, allowing different aircraft types to exchange information periodically. Despite this protocol’s advantages, it is vulnerable to flooding, denial of service, and injection attacks. In this paper, we decided to join the initiative of securing this protocol and propose an efficient detection method to help detect any exploitation attempts by injecting these messages with the wrong information. This paper focused mainly on three attacks: path modification, ghost aircraft injection, and velocity drift attacks. This paper aims to provide a revolutionary methodology that, even in the face of new attacks (zero-day attacks), can successfully detect injected messages. The main advantage was utilizing a recent dataset to create more reliable and adaptive training and testing materials, which were then preprocessed before using different machine learning algorithms to feasibly create the most accurate and time-efficient model. The best outcomes of the binary classification were obtained with 99.14% accuracy, an F1-score of 99.14%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.982. At the same time, the best outcomes of the multiclass classification were obtained with 99.41% accuracy, an F1-score of 99.37%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.988. Eventually, our best outcomes outdo existing models, but we believe the model would benefit from more testing of other types of attacks and a bigger dataset.

Keywords

• aviation security
• aircraft surveillance
• automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B)
• ADS-B security threats
• ADS-B message injection
• ML detection model