Automatic dependent surveillance: attacks, challenges and countermeasures

Outlet Title

Journal of Transportation Security

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

This work surveys existing research involving Cybersecurity proposals to improve the Confidentiality and Integrity of Automatic Dependent Surveillance (ADS) messages. The ADS network represents the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) recommended standard for tracking navigational information about aircraft in transit. The standard utilizes existing hardware and transmission protocols to allow for easy adoption using hardware already installed on aircraft however, due to size limitations, structure, and traffic congestion, offers limited to no protections in terms of data integrity and confidentiality. While the lack of confidentiality is typically driven by ICAO’s and the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) desire for civil aviation flight navigation to be open and transparent, the lack of data integrity protection seems to revolve around cyber security being an afterthought. Researchers have identified this gap have provided proposals on how to introduce measures to protect the integrity of ADS data and in some cases introduce a level of confidentiality as well, throughout this survey we will explore the existing research to identify gaps and avenues of advancing the research further.

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