Signal Discrimination and Exploitation of ADS-B Transmission

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) signals are transmissions from aircraft, these broadcasts provide the planes position and pertinent health and safety parameters. The ADS-B signals are constructed as 10 byte messages encoded by pulse-position modulation (PPM). This paper explores current security concerns with ADS-B signals and implements interference attacks against simulated ADS-B signals. A testbed is demonstrated with a software-defined radio (SDR) and GNURadio software is used to generate simulated flight data. This simulated flight data is intentionally corrupted with constructive, destructive, and delayed signals intent on interfering with the ADS-B waveform. The destructive interference attack resulted in the largest degradation of signal reception with an error rate of 20 percent. Considerations of the transmission requirements and output power are reviewed in order to begin to address the security issues demonstrated through these experiments.