299
Utilizing Air Traic
Communications for OSINT on
State and Government Aircraft
Abstract: In recent times, we have witnessed a trend in which communications data
is increasingly collected and made open source by the public. A prominent example
is the tracking of aircraft movements using unencrypted air trafc control (ATC)
communication. This paper studies the implications of such new open source aircraft
datasets on the operational privacy of military and government actors. We use publicly
available aircraft metadata in conjunction with unltered ATC communication
gathered from the collaborative sensor network OpenSky. We show that using these
datasets, it is possible to collect, process and analyze large numbers of movements in
an automated fashion, providing insights into potentially sensitive operations.
Martin Strohmeier
Department of Computer Science
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
martin.strohmeier@cs.ox.ac.uk
Daniel Moser
Department of Computer Science
ETH Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland
daniel.moser@inf.ethz.ch
Vincent Lenders
Science and Technology
armasuisse
Thun, Switzerland
vincent.lenders@armasuisse.ch
Matthew Smith
Department of Computer Science
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
matthew.smith@cs.ox.ac.uk
Matthias Schäfer
Department of Computer Science
University of Kaiserslautern
Kaiserslautern, Germany
schaefer@cs.uni-kl.de
Ivan Martinovic
Department of Computer Science
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
ivan.martinovic@cs.ox.ac.uk
2018 10th International Conference on Cyber Conict
CyCon X: Maximising Eects
T. Minárik, R. Jakschis, L. Lindström (Eds.)
2018 © NATO CCD COE Publications, Tallinn
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