Method to emulate the L-band digital aeronautical communication system for SESAR evaluation and verification

IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage.

Schmitt

et al. 2022

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.

Section: B Computer Simulationsupporting

confidence: 55%

Advancing the Security of LDACS

IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage.

Schmitt

et al. 2022

“…In 2015, Gräupl et al [27] presented a full methodology on how to emulate latencies for user data in the forward and reverse link of LDACS depending on the Bit Error Rate (BER) and message size. The required equations to calculate FL/RL latencies for LDACS are briefly described in the following and for more details of LDACS framing, we refer to [8].…”

Section: B Model To Emulate Latencies For Ldacsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Different Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Flavors for LDACS

2020 AIAA/IEEE 39th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC)

Gentsch

et al. 2020

Growth of civil air traffic worldwide poses a great challenge for the supporting Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) infrastructure. Analogue systems have to be replaced by digital means to optimize spectrum efficiency and automation is becoming much more important to be able to handle the amount of participants in the air traffic system. As safety and security are strongly intertwined in aviation, cybersecurity is one key enabler for digitalization in civil aviation. As such we investigate mutual authentication and key agreement methods for the digital aeronautical ground-based communications system L-band Digital Aeronautical Communication System (LDACS). Thereby, we compare the suitability of three different Diffie-Hellmann (DH) key exchange flavors used in a modified version of the Station-To-Station (STS) protocol, for digital aeronautical communication in terms of latency and security data overhead. We conclude, the STS protocol based on a central Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) trust solution with Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) for post-quantum security to be best suited for long term security. However, due to the smaller key sizes, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) is the more resource efficient candidate and may play a role in low resource authentication scenarios for LDACS.

“…Further we checked for different BERs, to measure the impact of the BER on performance. BER steps were chosen according to previous work [14], ranging from 0, 10 −6 , 10 −5 and10 −4 . However the BER should only start to be noticeable around a BER of 10 −5 .…”

Section: A Time Overhead By Security Additionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of the LDACS Cybersecurity Implementation

2019 IEEE/AIAA 38th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC)

Schmitt

2019

Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) infrastructure in civil aviation must evolve as fast as possible to cope with all challenges posed by the growth of the worldwide population, globalization and the demand for more and more mobility worldwide. Analogue systems are replaced by digital means, automation is becoming much more important to handle new entrants in the air traffic system, spectrum saturation must be solved by introducing digital systems and the safety and security of the safety critical infrastructure surrounding civil aviation must be constantly updated to support the ever-growing complexity of the system. As one of the Future Communication Infrastructure (FCI) candidates we introduce LDACS as the very first true integrated CNS system worldwide. In previous works we have already analyzed its cybersecurity and developed an architecture with corresponding algorithm and proofed the improvement of the cybersecurity due to our security additions. Here we implement the LDACS cybersecurity architecture and evaluate the impact of introduced security overhead on the LDACS system. We conclude that the proposed protection mechanisms successfully mitigate previously identified risks and only add minor time, data and computation overhead on top of the LDACS protocol stack, making the security solutions a good candidate to be included in the SESAR wave 2 updated LDACS specification.