A Secure Cell-Attachment Procedure of LDACS

Mäurer, Nils; Gräupl, Thomas; Gentsch, Christoph; Guggemos, Tobias; Tiepelt, Marcel; Schmitt, Corinna; Rodosek, Gabi Dreo

doi:10.1109/eurospw54576.2021.00019

Cited by 8 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The LDACS cell-attachment security design matches requirements established in previous work [10], [12], [16] and standard protocols and well-established approaches for embedding cryptography are re-used wherever possible.…”

Section: Design Goalsmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…The GS communicates to the AS in the Forward Link (FL). LDACS offers dynamic Coding and Modulation Scheme (CMS) depending on channel quality and enables 230.53 to 1 Part of this work was published at the 1st IEEE Workshop on Secure and Reliable Communication and Navigation in the Aerospace Domain (SRCNAS) in conjunction with IEEE Euro S&P 2021 [16]. This paper extends the previous work with the analysis of the LTE security design (Section III-C), an update of the LDACS PKI with a hybrid selection between pre-and post-quantum based certificates (Section IV), an update of the LDACS cellattachment procedure (Section V-C), a detailed evaluation of the performance of the proposed cell-attachment procedure in extensive simulations (Section VI-B) and a discussion of these findings (Section VII).…”

Section: Background On Ldacsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The details of the symbolic model of the LDACS cell attachment procedure are discussed in [16]. Only the relevant results are therefore repeated here.…”

Section: A Symbolic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Tamarin prover version 1.6.0 was used in automatic mode to prove the five lemmata presented in [16]. The verification took 2 m 10 s on a Ubuntu 18.04 Laptop with an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8650U CPU and 16GB of RAM.…”

Section: A Symbolic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The objective of this paper is to propose a cell-attachment procedure with flexible underlying cryptographic measures, establishing a secure LDACS communication channel between an aircraft and corresponding ground-station upon cellentry of that aircraft. This paper is an extension of [16]. Section II includes relevant technical background about LDACS and is completed with related work presented in Section III.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Advancing the Security of LDACS

Mäurer

Gräupl

Schmitt

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage.

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The "Single European Sky" air traffic management master plan foresees the introduction of several modern digital data links for aeronautical communications. The candidate for long-range continental communications is the L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS). LDACS is a cellular, ground-based digital communications system for flight guidance and communications related to safety and regularity of flight. Hence, the aeronautical standards, imposed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), for cybersecurity of the link and network layer, apply. In previous works, threat-and risk analyses of LDACS were conducted, a draft for an LDACS cybersecurity architecture introduced, algorithms proposed, and the security of a Mutual Authentication and Key Establishment (MAKE) procedure of LDACS formally verified. However, options for cipher-suites and certificate management for LDACS were missing. Also, previous works hardly discussed the topic of post-quantum security for LDACS. This paper proposes a cell-attachment procedure, which establishes a secure LDACS communication channel between an aircraft and corresponding ground-station upon cell-entry of the aircraft. Via the design of a hybrid LDACS Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), the choice of a pre-or post-quantum Security Level (SL) is up to the communications participants. With that, this work introduces a full LDACS cell-attachment protocol based on a PKI, certificates, certificate revocation and cipher-suites including pre-and postquantum options. Evaluations in the symbolic model show the procedure to fulfill LDACS security requirements and a communications performance evaluation demonstrates feasibility, matching requirements imposed by regulatory documents.

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Section: Design Goalsmentioning

confidence: 74%

Section: Background On Ldacsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The details of the symbolic model of the LDACS cell attachment procedure are discussed in [16]. Only the relevant results are therefore repeated here.…”

Section: A Symbolic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Symbolic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Advancing the Security of LDACS

Mäurer

Gräupl

Schmitt

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage.

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Secure Point-to-Point Long-Distance Multi-Hop Connections in a Dense Airplane Mesh-Network using LDACS

Jansen

Mäurer

Gräupl

2022

2022 IEEE/AIAA 41st Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC)

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The capacity of current aeronautical datalinks is reaching its limits and becomes a hindrance for growth of worldwide civil aviation. To modernize Air Traffic Management (ATM) and digitize aeronautical communications, successors for current technologies are being researched and deployed. The envisioned successor for the VHF Datalink mode 2 (VDLm2) for European air traffic is the L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS). Similar to VDLm2, LDACS is a terrestrial, cellular Air-Ground (A/G) communications system. Contrary to VDLm2, LDACS shall also provide an Air-Air (A/A) communication mode in the future, called LDACS A/A, which operates in a radius of 200 Nautical Miles (NM) for aircraft above altitude of 3000m. Long-distance multi-hop A/A communications could be used to extend the range of LDACS ground stations into oceanic and remote areas, increasing the utility of the terrestrial infrastructure. While LDACS A/G offers sound cybersecurity measures, the development of such for an LDACS A/A extension is currently in its infancy and needs to be investigated thoroughly. One particular design constraint for cybersecurity for aeronautical multi-hop A/A networks is the topology of the underlying mesh network. The objectives of this paper are to investigate (1) the number of concurrent aircraft that are within communication range to each other and (2) the number of hops necessary to cover given distances and (3) to propose possible cybersecurity approaches for LDACS A/A in particular. With actual flight traces data from the OpenSky database for European air traffic, we identify high fluctuations of results based on the time of day and region. The following results were obtained: (1) concurrent aircraft are ranging from 0 to 258, (2) on an exemplary route from Istanbul to Dublin, ranging roughly 3000km, 9 hops were necessary on average with stable routes lasting 1m 21s on average and (3) up to 19% of the total stable connection time is used for establishing a secure Peer-to-Peer (P2P) tunnel via mutual authentication between all hops.

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