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The US FAA regulations and regulations from other global Civil Aviation Authorities impose significant limitations on secure Broadcast Remote ID strategies for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). One of the most challenging constraints is configuring messaging within Bluetooth 4 broadcast frames, seemingly limiting the capacity for a reliable Remote ID and trust in UAS communications. However, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Drone Remote ID Protocol (DRIP) workgroup has adeptly navigated these constraints. They have developed a provably secure Remote ID that authenticates all its messages and can be independently validated without needing an external, internet-based verification service. Remarkably, they achieve this within the stringent message length confines set by Broadcast Remote ID regulations and American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards. This novel solution, the DRIP Entity Tag (DET), doubles as a legitimate yet non-routable IPv6 address. Beyond its primary application, the DET has promising potential for adoption in broader mobile device ecosystems, fostering interdevice trust. In this paper, we explain the DRIP initiative and its implementation in real-world scenarios and examine its potential use on various mobile devices.

The aviation industry faces significant challenges due to rising global air travel demand. Frequency saturation in Air Traffic Management (ATM) leads to communication problems, necessitating the enhancement of traditional systems. The Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) initiative, backed by the European Commission, aims to digitize ATM, with the L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS) as a key component. LDACS aims to improve communication, enhance surveillance, and optimize airspace usage for safer, more efficient ATM. Although LDACS is protected against most cyberattacks, a critical security objective, anonymity, is currently overlooked. To strengthen LDACS's security, robust authentication mechanisms, Post-Quantum security, and measures to ensure aircraft anonymity are crucial. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive security framework to enhance LDACS's cybersecurity, focusing on mutual authentication and key agreement. The protocol uses Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for robust mutual authentication and Bit-flipping Key Encapsulation (BIKE) for secure session key establishment utilizing Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). This framework ensures anonymity and secure communication between aircraft and ground stations while minimizing message exchange, latency, and data overhead. An informal security analysis confirms our proposed framework's potential to augment the efficiency and security of ATM operations., Funding Agencies|Trafikverket and Luftfartsverket under Automation Program II; Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP)

Although the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are yet to be fully investigated, the visionaries of the 6th generation (6G) echo systems have already come into the discussion. Therefore, in order to consolidate and solidify the security and privacy in 6G networks, we survey how security may impact the envisioned 6G wireless systems, possible challenges with different 6G technologies, and the potential solutions. We provide our vision on 6G security and security key performance indicators (KPIs) with the tentative threat landscape based on the foreseen 6G network architecture. Moreover, we discuss the security and privacy challenges that may encounter with the available 6G requirements and potential 6G applications. We also give the reader some insights into the standardization efforts and research-level projects relevant to 6G security. In particular, we discuss the security considerations with 6G enabling technologies such as distributed ledger technology (DLT), physical layer security, distributed AI/ML, visible light communication (VLC), THz, and quantum computing. All in all, this work intends to provide enlightening guidance for the subsequent research of 6G security and privacy at this initial phase of vision towards reality.

Controller-Pilot Data Link Communication, a technology that has been introduced to help offload the congested VHF voice communication in larger airports, is being questioned on its sufficiency in security. As the traffic load in air traffic communication keeps demanding more reliable and secure systems, we in this paper look at how widely CPDLC is actually used in practice in Europe. By using the newly introduced technology in software defined radios, we show that it is possible to capture and decode CPDLC messages to readable plain text. Furthermore, we discuss which type of attacks could be possible with information retrieved from CPDLC communication.

Communication systems in aviation tend to focus on safety rather than security. Protocols such as ADS-B are known to use plain-text, unauthenticated messages and thus are open to various attacks. Controller-Pilot Data Communication Link is no exception and was shown vulnerable also in practice. In this paper, we propose a cryptographic mechanism to provide secure mobility for CPDLC that can enable data encryption and authentication. The protocol is formally verified with the Proverif tool. We also estimate the byte overhead in CPDLC use., Funding Agencies|Trafikverket and Luftfartsverket under Automation Program II

Fast Reroute (FRR) and other forms of immediate failover have long been used to recover from certain classes of failures without invoking the network control plane. While the set of such techniques is growing, the level of resiliency to failures that this approach can provide is not adequately understood. We embark upon a systematic algorithmic study of the resiliency of immediate failover in a variety of models (with/without packet marking/duplication, etc.). We leverage our findings to devise new schemes for immediate failover and show, both theoretically and experimentally, that these outperform existing approaches. 2016 IEEE.

Communication systems in aviation tend to focus on safety rather than security. Protocols such as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) use plain-text, unauthenticated messages and, therefore, open to various attacks. The open and shared nature of the ADS-B protocol makes its messages extremely vulnerable to various security threats, such as jamming, flooding, false information, and false Squawk attacks. To handle this security issue in the ADS-B system, a state-of-theart dataset is required to train the ADS-B system against these attacks using machine learning algorithms. Therefore, we generated the dataset with four new attacks: name jumping attack, false information attack, false heading attack, and false squawk attack. After the dataset generation, we performed some data pre-processing steps, including removing missing values, removing outliers from data, and data transformation. After pre-processing, we applied three machine learning algorithms. Logistic regression, Naive Bayes, and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) are used in this paper. We used accuracy, precision, recall, F1-Score, and false alarm rate (FAR) to evaluate the performance of machine learning algorithms. KNN outperformed Naive Bayes and logistic regression algorithms in terms of the results. We achieved 0% FAR for anomaly messages, and for normal ADS-B messages, we achieved 0.10% FAR, respectively. On average more than 99.90% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score are achieved using KNN for both normal and anomaly ADS-B messages., Funding Agencies|Automation Program II, Trafikverket

Several studies have shown insufficient security in air traffic communication. Controller-Pilot Datalink Communications (CPDLC) is used to communicate in text over the VHF data link, and Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) determines the position of an aircraft. The vulnerability of air data communication was confirmed by successful experiments using Software-Defined Radio, where both CPDLC and ADS-B messages were transmitted in a safe environment. Neither ADS-B messages nor CPDLC messages are encrypted during transmission. The encoding of FANS-1/A messages was demonstrated, and the experiments showed that it is possible to send such messages with relatively inexpensive technology., Funding Agencies|Trafikverket and Luftfartsverket under Automation Program II

In Air Traffic Management (ATM) training, simulations of real air traffic control (ATC) scenarios are a key part of practical teaching. On the internet one may find multiple different ATM simulators available to the public with open source code. Today most aircraft transmit data about position, altitude, and speed into the atmosphere that practically are unencrypted data points. This data is called automatic dependant surveillance broadcast (ADS-B) data. The lack of security means that potential attackers could project "fake" ADS-B data and spoof existing data to air traffic controllers (ATCO) if the right equipment is used. We see this as a security flaw and we want to prepare ATCO for cyberattacks by modifying an ATM simulator with cyberattacks. First, OpenScope was chosen as the ATM simulator to be modified. Subsequently, three types of attacks were chosen for the simulator to be equipped with, based on ADS-B weaknesses from existing literature: aircraft not responding to commands, aircraft with altering positional data, and aircraft with incorrect speed and altitude data. The recorded parameters were the written command lines and corresponding aircraft type it was applied to. Using this modified simulator, ATCO can now be evaluated against cyberattacks., Funding Agencies|Automation Program II, Trafikverket

The pervasive and smart healthcare is important for elderly patients which has revolutionized the medical world and caught the attention from industry and academia with the help of portable sensor-enabled devices. Tiny size and resource-constrained nature restricts them to perform several tasks at a time. Thus, energy drain, limited battery lifetime, and high packet loss ratio (PLR) are the key challenges to be tackled carefully for ubiquitous healthcare. Energy efficiency, reliability and longer battery cycle are the vital ingredients for wearable devices to empower cost-effective and pervasive medical environment. Thus,this research work has three key contributions. First, a novel transmission power control driven energy efficient algorithm (EEA) is proposed to enhance energy, battery lifetime and reliability while monitoring the health status of elderly patients. Proposed EEA and conventional constant transmission power control (TPC) are evaluated by adopting real-time datasets of static (i.e., wheelchair sitting) and dynamic (i.e., wheelchair moving) body postures of elderly patients. Second, smart healthcare framework is proposed. Third, performance metrics such as, energy drain, battery lifetime and reliability are introduced and calculated by considering average and threshold RSSI and TPC values. Finally, it is observed through experimental analysis that the proposed EEA enhances energy efficiency with acceptable PLR than the constant TPC during data transmission., Funding Agencies|CENIIT project 17.01 Computer and Information Science department, Linkoping University, Linkoping, Sweden; PIFI [2020BVC0002]; Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology,Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIAT,CAS), Shenzhen; PR of China Ministry of Education Distinguished Possessor Grant [MS2017BJKJ003]; Programa Operacional Regional do Centro (CENTRO 2020), through the Sistema de Apoio Investigao Cientfica e Tecnolgica Programas Integrados de ICDT

The widespread Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems empower the deployment of various Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensor nodes in many ambient assisted living (AAL) type applications. Regardless of their limitations, these low-power IoT sensor nodes need pervasive and secure connections to transfer the aggregated data to the central servers located in remote clouds which will perform further processing and storing functions. The common practice is to use one or multiple dedicated gateways to assist the communication between the sensor and the cloud. This paper presents a mobile-based relay assistance solution for establishing secure end-to-end (E2E) connectivity between low power IoT sensors and cloud servers without using a dedicated gateway. za The prototype implementation and the described security features verify the technical readiness of the proposed solution., Funding Agencies|Academy of Finland [318927]; TEKES, Finland; Center for Industrial Information Technology (CENIIT)

Hackers hide behind compromised intermediate hosts and pose advanced persistent threats (APTs). The compromised hosts are used as stepping stones to launch real attacks, as is evident from an incident that shook the world in 2016 - Panama Papers Leak. The major attack would not go unnoticed if the compromised stepping stone, in this case an email server, could be identified in time. In this paper, we explore how todays programmable networks could be retrofitted with effective stepping stone detection mechanisms to correlate flows. We share initial results to prove that such a setup exists. Lastly, we analyze scalability issues associated with the setup and explore recent developments in network monitoring which have potential to address these issues., Funding Agencies|Center for Industrial Information Technology (CENIIT) [17:01]