Air Traffic Management Blockchain Infrastructure for
Security, Authentication, and Privacy
Ronald J. Reisman
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, 94035
[Abstract] Current radar-based air traffic service providers may preserve
privacy for military and corporate operations by procedurally preventing
public release of selected flight plans, position, and state data. The FAA
mandate for national adoption of Automatic Dependent Surveillance
Broadcast (ADS-B) in 2020 does not include provisions for maintaining these
same aircraft-privacy options, nor does it address the potential for spoofing,
denial of service, and other well-documented risk factors. This paper presents
an engineering prototype that embodies a design and method that may be
applied to mitigate these ADS-B security issues. The design innovation is the
use of an open source permissioned blockchain framework to enable aircraft
privacy and anonymity while providing a secure and efficient method for
communication with Air Traffic Services, Operations Support, or other
authorized entities. This framework features certificate authority, smart
contract support, and higher-bandwidth communication channels for private
information that may be used for secure communication between any specific
aircraft and any particular authorized member, sharing data in accordance
with the terms specified in the form of smart contracts. The prototype
demonstrates how this method can be economically and rapidly deployed in a
scalable modular environment.
I. Introduction
Although the FAA has mandated that aircraft flying in the National Airspace System (NAS)
must equip with the Automatic Dependent Surveillance System (ADS-B) by 2020
,
, general
aviation
and the US military
lag behind their implementation schedule. It is widely recognized
that there are still unsolved issues that complicate ADS-B adoption for stakeholders
who want to
maintain the current levels of privacy
, anonymity
, authentication
and resistance to malicious
interference
, including spoofing
and/or denial of service attacks.
There have been many proposals for making the ADS-B system more secure, though none have
been accepted by the stakeholders, and the FAA does not currently endorse any particular plan for
addressing these issues.
The prior art in this field is often divided into two areas: secure location
verification, and secure broadcast authorization. The approaches to secure location verification
include multilateration
, distance bounding
, Kalman filtering
, group verification
, intent
verification
data fusion
, and traffic modeling
. The approaches to secure broadcast
Aero Computer Engineer, Flight Trajectory Dynamics and Controls Branch, M/S 210-10
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20190000022 2020-03-31T07:19:19+00:00Z
