More than a dozen wireless technologies are used by air traffic communication systems during different flight phases. From a conceptual perspective, all of them are insecure as security was never part of their design. Recent contributions from academic and hacking communities have exploited this inherent vulnerability to demonstrate attacks on some of these technologies. However, not all of these contributions have resonated widely within aviation circles. At the same time, the security community lacks certain aviation domain knowledge, preventing aviation authorities from giving credence to their findings.In this survey, we aim to reconcile the view of the security community and the perspective of aviation professionals concerning the safety of air traffic communication technologies. To achieve this, we first provide a systematization of the applications of wireless technologies upon which civil aviation relies. Based on these applications, we comprehensively analyze vulnerabilities and existing attacks. We further survey the existing research on countermeasures and categorize it into approaches that are applicable in the short term and research of secure new technologies deployable in the long term.Since not all of the required aviation knowledge is codified in academic publications, we additionally examine existing aviation standards and survey 242 international aviation experts. Besides their domain knowledge, we also analyze the awareness of members of the aviation community concerning the security of wireless systems and collect their expert opinions on the potential impact of concrete attack scenarios using these technologies.

This paper provides up-to-date statistics on SSR Mode S and 1090ES ADS-B usage from the OpenSky Network. By analyzing the large host of real-world data collected by OpenSky, we provide insights on the current composition of Mode S downlink communications, aircraft equipage, interrogation patterns and much more. We publish up-to-date, empirically validated numbers on the status of the ongoing ADS-B deployment based on data collected over large areas in Europe, North America, and New Zealand, and categorize these aircraft by incorporating publicly available data sources.

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