Holistic Air Protection Scheme of ADS-B Communication

The avionics world is making the transition in the coming years to the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) communication in order to determine parameters like for instance position and velocity of the aircraft in the air. The standard does not currently include any kind of authentication or encryption in the transmitted messages and is therefore vulnerable against different types of attacks. In this paper, a system, called holistic air protection (HAP), is proposed, which is able to provide different levels of security by offering authentication of the payload with potential encryption of identifier and/or payload of the message. As a consequence, a holistic solution is obtained, which can be applied by both commercial and military aircraft or in case of a security attack. HAP relies on implicit certificates and a generalized elliptic curve-based signcryption scheme. The resulting overhead due to the cryptographic operations is in the same range as the timed efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication (TESLA)-based proposed security schemes, considering the same security strength. Moreover, HAP is also able to obtain faster authentication and a thus faster guarantee of a verified update.