On the Feasibility of Exploiting Traffic Collision Avoidance System Vulnerabilities

TL;DR

This paper investigates the security vulnerabilities of Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) in aircraft, demonstrating that malicious actors can exploit these systems using accessible digital tools to potentially cause mid-air collisions.

Contribution

It introduces methods for analyzing TCAS vulnerabilities and develops an experimental Phantom Aircraft generator to demonstrate attack feasibility.

Findings

Attacks on TCAS are feasible with open-source tools.

Malicious signals can induce near mid-air collisions.

Demonstrates practical attack implementation using SDRs.

Abstract

Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) are safety-critical systems required on most commercial aircrafts in service today. However, TCAS was not designed to account for malicious actors. While in the past it may have been infeasible for an attacker to craft radio signals to mimic TCAS signals, attackers today have access to open-source digital signal processing software, like GNU Radio, and inexpensive software defined radios (SDR) that enable the transmission of spurious TCAS messages. In this paper, methods, both qualitative and quantitative, for analyzing TCAS from an adversarial perspective are presented. To demonstrate the feasibility of inducing near mid-air collisions between current day TCAS-equipped aircraft, an experimental Phantom Aircraft generator is developed using GNU Radio and an SDR against a realistic threat model.