Tobias Lüscher (ETH Zurich), Martin Strohmeier (Cyber-Defence Campus, armasuisse S+T), Vincent Lenders (Cyber-Defence Campus, armasuisse S+T)

Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Contract (ADS-C) is an satellite-based aviation datalink application used to monitor aircraft in remote regions. It is a crucial method for air traffic control to track aircraft where other protocols such as ADS-B lack connectivity. Even though it has been conceived more than 30 years ago, and other legacy communication protocols in aviation have shown to be vulnerable, ADS-C’s security has not been investigated so far in the literature. We conduct a first investigation to close this gap. First, we compile a comprehensive overview of the history, impact, and technical details of ADSC and its lower layers. Second, we build two software-defined radio receivers in order to analyze over 120’000 real-world ADSC messages. We further illustrate ADS-C’s lack of authentication by implementing an ADS-C transmitter, which is capable of generating and sending arbitrary ADS-C messages. Finally, we use the channel control offered through a software-defined ADSC receiver and transmitter as a basis for an in-depth analysis of the protocol weaknesses of the ADS-C system. The found vulnerabilities range from passively tracking aircraft to actively altering the position of actual aircraft through attacks on the downlink and the uplink. We assess the difficulty and impact of these attacks and discuss potential countermeasures.

View More Papers

Phoenix: Surviving Unpatched Vulnerabilities via Accurate and Efficient Filtering...

Hugo Kermabon-Bobinnec (Concordia University), Yosr Jarraya (Ericsson Security Research), Lingyu Wang (Concordia University), Suryadipta Majumdar (Concordia University), Makan Pourzandi (Ericsson Security Research)

Read More

LMSanitator: Defending Prompt-Tuning Against Task-Agnostic Backdoors

Chengkun Wei (Zhejiang University), Wenlong Meng (Zhejiang University), Zhikun Zhang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and Stanford University), Min Chen (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Minghu Zhao (Zhejiang University), Wenjing Fang (Ant Group), Lei Wang (Ant Group), Zihui Zhang (Zhejiang University), Wenzhi Chen (Zhejiang University)

Read More

Understanding the Implementation and Security Implications of Protective DNS...

Mingxuan Liu (Zhongguancun Laboratory; Tsinghua University), Yiming Zhang (Tsinghua University), Xiang Li (Tsinghua University), Chaoyi Lu (Tsinghua University), Baojun Liu (Tsinghua University), Haixin Duan (Tsinghua University; Zhongguancun Laboratory), Xiaofeng Zheng (Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University; QiAnXin Technology Research Institute & Legendsec Information Technology (Beijing) Inc.)

Read More

AdvCAPTCHA: Creating Usable and Secure Audio CAPTCHA with Adversarial...

Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee (Carnegie Mellon University), Wei-Lun Kao (National Taiwan University), Hung-Jui Wang (National Taiwan University), Ruei-Che Chang (University of Michigan), Yi-Hao Peng (Carnegie Mellon University), Fu-Yin Cherng (National Chung Cheng University), Shang-Tse Chen (National Taiwan University)

Read More