ABSTRACT
Abstract : This paper presents a comprehensive survey of network security issues and challenges in future
data
Thislink networks.
paper presentsThe paper gives ansurvey
a comprehensive overview of of the civil
network aviation
security industry
issues efforts for in
and challenges securing the future
future data link
Aeronautical Data Communications. The aviation communication technologies are
networks. The paper gives an overview of the civil aviation industry efforts for securing the future progressively shifting
towards the useData
Aeronautical of digital data insteadThe
Communications. of analog
aviationvoice for traffic control,
communication airline
technologies arebusiness, and passenger
progressively shifting
onboard
towards entertainment systems.
the use of digital The open
data instead and voice
of analog wireless
for environment
traffic control,ofairline
data business,
link networks makes it
and passenger
vulnerable to serious attacks.
onboard entertainment This The
systems. paperopen
discuss
and about enhancement
wireless environment of network
of data tolinkovercome
networksthemakes
problemsit
related to voice
vulnerable radio communication
to serious and to
attacks. This paper modernize
discuss about the Air TrafficofManagement
enhancement environment.
network to overcome Data link
the problems
networks
related toraise several
voice radio security concerns
communication andfortoall users including
modernize pilots, air
the Air Traffic traffic controllers,
Management airlineData
environment. staff,link
and
even passengers.
networks This survey
raise several can
security be usedfor
concerns as all
a reference guide pilots,
users including to firstair
understand the factors
traffic controllers, thatstaff,
airline urge andboth
the research community and the aviation industry to be concerned about network security
even passengers. This survey can be used as a reference guide to first understand the factors that urge both in future
Aeronautical
the researchData Communications.
community and the aviation industry to be concerned about network security in future
Aeronautical Data Communications.
Keywords:
Keywords:-CivilCivil
Aviation, Air Air
Aviation, Transport System,
Transport Network
System, Security,
Network Aeronautical
Security, data
Aeronautical Communication,
data Communication,Data
link
Data link
I. INTRODUCTION
tuned to the same frequency. This can be
Aeronautical communications are about to challenging, considering the expected air traffic
shift the paradigm of digital data in near future. A growth. This growth is due to many factors such as
digital data link system was introduced, namely an increased aircraft manufacturers market, more
ACARS (Aircraft Communication Addressing and competitive low-cost airlines, an increased
Reporting System), to essentially support radio passenger demand and the greater need for
voice systems, which were nearly running at their companies to provide a better service to their
maximum capacity. The term data link is customers.
commonly used among the civil aviation
community to represent digital communications B. Congestion of the Aviation Radio Frequency
between an aircraft and a ground station (i.e. an air
traffic tower control, an airline operational control A frequency saturation may delay the
center). Data link networks raise several security communication between the pilot and the controller
concerns for all users including pilots, air traffic and make them unreachable for a certain period of
controllers, airline staff, and even passengers. time. Many solutions have been provided in the
past in order to address this frequency congestion
II. EVOLUTION OF issue such as optimizing frequency reuse, using a
AERONAUTICAL larger spectrum or even splitting the radio spectrum
COMMUNICATION NETWORKS into narrower bandwidths (50 kHz to 25 kHz
channels). Air traffic sector division cannot be
A. Growth in Air Traffic Load considered as an efficient long-term solution for
radio voice frequency saturation. In order to
When an analog voice radio communication address the air traffic growth and subsequent
technology is used, all pilots in the same sector and frequency congestion issues, the industry is
communicating with an air traffic controller are progressively leaving analog voice at the expense
of digital data communications.
Future Air communication services and Fig. 1: Data Link Communications in the Future
their supporting systems will be based on data link Airspace System
technologies to provide both operational services
and non-operational services. The opportunity to take advantage of safety-
ATS services support ATC (Air Traffic related service aggregation with airline and
Control) messages between the pilot and passenger services will require appropriate security
the traffic controller.
countermeasures to protect the operational services
AOC ( Airline Operational Services) are
required for efficient CNS and ATM from new threats. ATS traffic requires high priority
operations. This service category supports and full availability, whereas AOC NG services
operational voice and/or data messages may have restricting QoS (Quality of Service)
between the aircraft and the airline or
requirements to be satisfied. While it is important
airport operational staff.
ACD (Aircraft Control Domain) regroups for the aircraft to maintain continuous network
all systems dedicated to the control of the connectivity with operational ground stations,
aircraft and the flight. availability becomes an important aspect of the
AISD (Airline Information Service overall network architecture, specially when
Domain) regroups non safety-related
systems dedicated to the maintenance and considering the usage of a single satellite link for
the crew. all the aeronautical services. Security requirements
PIESD (Passenger Information and for the communication system will be more
Entertainment Service Domain) contains complex to fulfill due to additional factors such as
all systems allowing the passengers to
access IFE/IFC services. traffic heterogeneity, aircraft mobility or scaling
PODD (Passenger Owned Devices issues. Providing IFC services for passengers may
Domain) is relevant to passenger owned be an open invitation for hacking the airground
systems which need be connected to the connectivity as the Internet is an open network
network (e.g. tablets, smart phones, where anyone can connect anywhere no matter
laptops). where they are.
Security corresponds to the approaches and This section summarizes what should be the main
methods used to mitigate risks resulting from a points of interest regarding cyber security in next
malicious intent like an unauthorized intrusion on generation aeronautical communications.
avionic systems. As a security attack may have
some consequences on the regulation of the flight, A. Data flow Logical Separation
security risks definitely imply safety risks in the
Currently, ATS communications have to be and policies involved in several process such as
strictly separated from other types of deployment, management, storage, and revocation
communications, because of safety and regulation of certificates when cryptography is used. Because
policies, as required by ICAO SARPs (Standards different aviation organizations may have different
and Recommended Practices). ICAO SARPs security policies in their own PKIs, interworking
define a set of end-to-end protocols and operational and roaming schemes between aircraft, end entities,
access procedures that allow both safety and non- or airlines are required. In such conditions,
safety aeronautical applications to use data link deploying a PKI regardless of these considerations
technologies independently of air-ground and becomes a tough task. Thus, a great challenge lies
ground-ground sub networks. In the perspective of in finding adequate mechanisms and a well-suited
a network architecture which allows the PKI for data link communications under such
coexistence of all aeronautical services in the same constraints.
infrastructure, an exciting challenge from a security
point of view emerges. E. Impact of Security on AirGround
Resources
B. Heterogeneity of Security Requirements Security has an undeniable impact on the
In operational aeronautical communi- network performances. Experimental studies have
cations, some security properties are more or less been carried out in the past and demonstrated the
required than others. One security mechanism performance impact due to security protocols such
would probably not be able to cover all the security as IPSec or SSL (Secure Socket Layer). Generally,
requirements for all traffic classes, unless the security should be optimized, otherwise it may
strongest security mechanism is deployed. For induce heavy overhead to data transmission and
instance, if IPsec is configured to use the AH could deteriorate the system performances. Finding
(Authentication Header) mode for all traffic the best trade-off between required security
classes, onboard users would likely hesitate (even services and system performances may be an
refuse) to access passenger services provided by interesting challenge to meet.
the airline (which could have an impact on the F. Vulnerability and Risk Assessment
business plan of the company). Indeed, AH does
not provide data confidentiality, which is actually Having assessed the risks, security
an issue if a passenger is entering some kind of measures (which could be technical or operational)
confidential data (e.g. passwords, credit card ID). are identified then implemented in order to mitigate
those risks. In the data link context, the risk
C. Defense in Depth resulting from interconnection between nodes and
different networks has to be mitigated because of
The idea behind defense in depth is to use
the future SWIM (System Wide Information
multiple security strategies at several layers, so that
Management) paradigm.
if one security layer falls down, there will be
always a security backup layer to prevent a full
breach into the communication system. Conse-
V. IMPROVEMENT
quently, having a security framework that takes the DIRECTIONS FOR AIRCRAFT
advantages of each security layer and uses them to COMMUNICATION
deal with the drawbacks of other security layers SECURITY
will be perfect.
Three solutions are given in order to
D. ATM Scalability address these data link security issues and
challenges.
In order to manage all the security primitives
A. Adaptive Security
that might be needed by aircraft, passengers, or
avionic systems, a PKI has to be deployed. PKI is Adaptive security should provide enough
usually defined as a set of practices, technologies, flexibility and accuracy to deal with many of the
effective communications in a large scale ATM [3] ARINC, Arinc report 811, commercial aircraft
system, it is suitable for CA to manage a limited information security concepts of operation and
Scal process framework, 2005.
able [4] W.H. Jones, M. de La Chapelle, Connexion by
Adaptiv Enhanced PKI
Data link security e vulnerability and boeing-broadband satellite communication
challenges security and key system for mobile platforms, in: Proc.
Man
risk age
Communications for Network-Centric
assessment ment Operations: Creating the Information Force.
Data flow logical IEEE Mili-tary Communications Conf.
separation
Heterogeneity of MILCOM 2001, vol. 2,2001,Pp 755758.
security requirements http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MILCOM.2001.9859
Defense in depth
ATM scalability 39
Impact of security on [5] C. Douligeris, D. Serpanos, Pki systems, in:
airground resources
Vulnerability and risk Network Security:Current Status and Future
assessment
Directions, IEEE, 2007, pp 409418.
number of PKI operations. Following Table shows
[6] R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, L. Adleman, A method
a mapping between the improvement security
for obtaining digital signatures and public-key
solutions provided in this paper and the data link cryptosystems, Commun. ACM 21 (1978)
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[7] FAA, Review of web applications security and
intrusion detection in air traffic control
Table : Mapping between challanges and systems. Report Number: FI-2009-049,
improvement directions in data link security
Technical Report, 2009.
[8] ARINC, Draft 1 of ARINC project paper 823
VI. CONCLUSION
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Since many years, the aviation industry is security, 2007.
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be addressed to avoid unwanted side effects. This overview of the aeronautical telecommuni-
paper is a survey of network security in the future cations network (atn) security concept, in:
aircraft data communications. It explains why Proc. DASC Digital Avionics Systems The
20th Conf, vol. 2, 2001. http:// dx.doi.org/
network security should be a central point of
10.1109/DASC.2001.964255.
interest in the future aircraft data communication
[10] R. Robinson, M. Li, S. Lintelman, K.
systems and provides an overview of the efforts
Sampigethaya, R. Poovendran, D. von
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Oheimb, J.-U. Buauer, J. Cuellar, Electronic
secure air traffic environment. Finally, main distribution of airplane software and the impact
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