Interoperable ADS-B Confidentiality

The worldwide air traffic infrastructure is in the late stages of transition from legacy transponder systems to Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) based systems. ADS-B relies on position information from GNSS and requires aircraft to transmit their identification, state, and position. ADS-B promises the availability of high-fidelity air traffic information; however, position and identification data are not secured via authentication or encryption. This lack of security for ADS-B allows non-participants to observe and collect data on both government and private flight activity. This is a proposal for a lightweight, interoperable ADS-B confidentiality protocol which uses existing format preserving encryption and an innovative unidirectional key handoff to ensure backward compatibility. Anonymity and data confidentiality are achieved selectively on a per-session basis. This research also investigates the effect of false replies unsynchronized in time (FRUIT) on the packet error ratio (PER) for Mode S transmissions. High PERs result in range and time limits being imposed on the key handoff mechanism of this proposal. Overall, this confidentiality protocol is ready for implementation, however further research is required to validate a revised key handoff mechanism

UAT ADS-B Data Anomalies and the Effect of Flight Parameters on Dropout Occurrences

An analysis of the performance of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) data received from the Grand Forks, North Dakota International Airport was carried out in this study. The purpose was to understand the vulnerabilities of the universal access transceiver (UAT) ADS-B system and recognize the effects on present and future air traffic control (ATC) operation. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated all the general aviation aircraft to be equipped with ADS-B. The aircraft flying within United States and below the transition altitude (18,000 feet) are more likely to install a UAT ADS-B. At present, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and autonomous air traffic control (ATC) towers are being integrated into the aviation industry and UAT ADS-B is a basic sensor for both class 1 and class 2 detect-and-avoid (DAA) systems. As a fundamental component of future surveillance systems, the anomalies and vulnerabilities of the ADS-B system need to be identified to enable a fully-utilized airspace with enhanced situational awareness. The data received was archived in GDL-90 format, which was parsed into readable data. The anomaly detection of ADS-B messages was based on the FAA ADS-B performance assessment report. The data investigation revealed ADS-B message suffered from different anomalies including dropout, missing payload, data jump, low confidence data, and altitude discrepancy. Among those studied, the most severe was dropout and 32.49% of messages suffered from this anomaly. Dropout is an incident where ADS-B failed to update within a specified rate. Considering the potential danger being imposed, an in-depth analysis was carried out to characterize message dropout. Three flight parameters were selected to investigate their effect on dropout. Statistical analysis was carried out and the Friedman Statistical Test identified that altitude affected dropout more than any other flight parameter

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Performance Analysis Of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) And Breakdown Of Anomalies

This thesis work analyzes the performance of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data received from Grand Forks International Airport, detects anomalies in the data and quantifies the associated potential risk. This work also assesses severity associated anomalous data in Detect and Avoid (DAA) for Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS). The received data were raw and archived in GDL-90 format. A python module is developed to parse the raw data into readable data in a .csv file. The anomaly detection algorithm is based on Federal Aviation Administration\u27s (FAA) ADS-B performance assessment report. An extensive study is carried out on two main types of anomalies, namely dropouts and altitude deviations. A dropout is considered when the update rate exceeds three seconds. Dropouts are of different durations and have a different level of risk depending on how much time ADS-B is unavailable as the surveillance system. Altitude deviation refers to the deviation between barometric and geometric altitude. Deviation ranges from 25 feet to 600 feet have been observed. As of now, barometric altitude has been used for separation and surveillance while geometric altitude can be used in cases where barometric altitude is not available. Many UAS might not have both sensors installed on board due to size and weight constrains. There might be a chance of misinterpretation of vertical separation specially while flying in National Airspace (NAS) if the ownship UAS and intruder manned aircraft use two different altitude sources for separation standard. The characteristics and agreement between two different altitudes is investigated with a regression based approach. Multiple risk matrices are established based on the severity of the DAA well clear. ADS-B is called the Backbone of FAA Next Generation Air Transportation System, NextGen. NextGen is the series of inter-linked programs, systems, and policies that implement advanced technologies and capabilities. ADS-B utilizes the Satellite based Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to provide the pilot and the Air Traffic Control (ATC) with more information which enables an efficient navigation of aircraft in increasingly congested airspace. FAA mandated all aircraft, both manned and unmanned, be equipped with ADS-B out by the year 2020 to fly within most controlled airspace. As a fundamental component of NextGen it is crucial to understand the behavior and potential risk with ADS-B Systems

Machine-Learning-Aided Trajectory Prediction and Conflict Detection for Internet of Aerial Vehicles

As exploitation of low and medium airspace for air traffic management (ATM) is gaining more attention, aerial vehicles' security issues pose a major challenge to the air-ground-integrated vehicle networks (AGIVNs). Traditional surveillance technology lacks the capacity to support the intensive ATM of the future. Therefore, an advanced automatic-dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) technique is applied to track and monitor aerial vehicles in a more effective manner. In this article, we propose a grouping-based conflict detection algorithm based on the preprocessed ADS-B data set, and analyze the experimental results and visualize the detected conflicts. Then, in order to further improve flight safety and conflict detection, the trajectories of the aerial vehicles are predicted based on machine learning-based algorithms. The results are fed into the conflict detection algorithm to execute conflict prediction. It was shown that the trajectory prediction model using long short-term memory (LSTM) can achieve better prediction performance, especially when predicting the long-term trajectory of aerial vehicles. The conflict detection results based on the trajectory prediction methods show that the proposed scheme can make it possible to detect whether there would be conflicts within seconds

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Privacy-preserving Cooperative Services for Smart Traffic

Communication technology and the increasing intelligence of things enable new qualities of cooperation. However, it is often unclear how complex functionality can be realized in a reliable and abuse-resistant manner without harming users\u27 privacy in the face of strong adversaries. This thesis focuses on three functional building blocks that are especially challenging in this respect: cooperative planning, geographic addressing and the decentralized provision of pseudonymous identifiers

Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Coherence for Video Object Detection in Robotics

This paper proposes a method to enhance video object detection for indoor environments in robotics. Concretely, it exploits knowledge about the camera motion between frames to propagate previously detected objects to successive frames. The proposal is rooted in the concepts of planar homography to propose regions of interest where to find objects, and recursive Bayesian filtering to integrate observations over time. The proposal is evaluated on six virtual, indoor environments, accounting for the detection of nine object classes over a total of ∼ 7k frames. Results show that our proposal improves the recall and the F1-score by a factor of 1.41 and 1.27, respectively, as well as it achieves a significant reduction of the object categorization entropy (58.8%) when compared to a two-stage video object detection method used as baseline, at the cost of small time overheads (120 ms) and precision loss (0.92).</p

Advances in Information Security and Privacy

With the recent pandemic emergency, many people are spending their days in smart working and have increased their use of digital resources for both work and entertainment. The result is that the amount of digital information handled online is dramatically increased, and we can observe a significant increase in the number of attacks, breaches, and hacks. This Special Issue aims to establish the state of the art in protecting information by mitigating information risks. This objective is reached by presenting both surveys on specific topics and original approaches and solutions to specific problems. In total, 16 papers have been published in this Special Issue