System Design Methodologies for Safety and Security of Future Wireless Technologies in Aviation

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) uses the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to pinpoint the aircraft’s location. Wireless technology is also connecting ground-based aviation facilities to each other via the internet protocol (IP). The use of ADS-B, GNSS, and wireless technologies raises many safety and security concerns. A number of potential solutions have been suggested. But as Kocher and others have pointed out, security is best built into a system design itself, rather than added later. While we cannot rebuild the ADS-B system, we can reconsider its security issues from scratch. In this paper, we use the Universal Modeling Language (UML) to specify security and safety threats to ADS-B. These UML diagrams will support thorough investigations of safety and security solutions, which will aid in making ADS-B more safe and secure. Our eventual goal is to develop an ADS-B formal specification for ADS-B model-checking.