Blockchain-Based Secure and Efficient ADS-B Authentication via Certificateless Signature With Packet Loss Tolerance

Abstract

The automatic dependent surveillance broadcast (ADS-B) system is a critical surveillance technology in air traffic management (ATM), essential for enhancing aviation safety and operational efficiency. However, ADS-B broadcasts plaintext messages over open channels without authentication mechanisms, and is constrained by message length limitations and low bandwidth, making it susceptible to various attacks, including deception, tampering, and replay. To address these challenges, we propose a secure and lightweight blockchain-integrated certificateless signature scheme (ECB-CLS) tailored for ADS-B systems with packet resilience. Specifically, we introduce an efficient signature verification algorithm based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) that supports batch verification without the need for certificate management, complex bilinear pairing, or hash-to-point calculations, significantly reducing computational overhead. Furthermore, our scheme leverages blockchain to ensure the decentralization and traceability of massive public keys and provides provable security against Type I and Type II adversary attacks. To address packet loss in practical environments, we incorporate both standard and enhanced Reed-Solomon (RS) coding to recover lost data. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our blockchain-integrated ECB-CLS scheme offers substantial advantages in computational efficiency and signature length compared to existing methods, while also showing that RS coding introduces low-performance overhead. This makes our solution highly suitable for resource-constrained ADS-B systems.