LoVe is in the Air -- Location Verification of ADS-B Signals using Distributed Public Sensors

TL;DR

LoVe is a lightweight, data-driven method for verifying ADS-B message authenticity using public sensors, achieving high accuracy and real-time scalability without requiring extensive sensor deployment or system modifications.

Contribution

The paper introduces LoVe, a novel location verification approach for ADS-B signals leveraging public sensor data, which is simple, scalable, and compatible with existing systems.

Findings

Achieves very low false positive rates (0 to 0.00106).

Achieves very low false negative rates (0.00065 to 0.00334).

Scales well with large sensor sets and is real-time compatible.

Abstract

The Automatic Dependant Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) message scheme was designed without any authentication or encryption of messages in place. It is therefore easily possible to attack it, e.g., by injecting spoofed messages or modifying the transmitted Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) coordinates. In order to verify the integrity of the received information, various methods have been suggested, such as multilateration, the use of Kalman filters, group certification, and many others. However, solutions based on modifications of the standard may be difficult and too slow to be implemented due to legal and regulatory issues. A vantage far less explored is the location verification using public sensor data. In this paper, we propose LoVe, a lightweight message verification approach that uses a geospatial indexing scheme to evaluate the trustworthiness of publicly deployed sensors and the ADS-B messages they receive. With LoVe, new messages can be evaluated with respect to the plausibility of their reported coordinates in a location privacy-preserving manner, while using a data-driven and lightweight approach. By testing our approach on two open datasets, we show that LoVe achieves very low false positive rates (between 0 and 0.00106) and very low false negative rates (between 0.00065 and 0.00334) while providing a real-time compatible approach that scales well even with a large sensor set. Compared to currently existing approaches, LoVe neither requires a large number of sensors, nor for messages to be recorded by as many sensors as possible simultaneously in order to verify location claims. Furthermore, it can be directly applied to currently deployed systems thus being backward compatible.