Invitation Oral Defense of Doctoral

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is an emerging software-defined radar technology that is supposed to replace current standards and is part of the Next Generation Transportation Systems (NextGen) in the US. In spite of its several benefits, this technology has been widely cited for being designed without security in mind, making it vulnerable to numerous attacks. Most approaches addressing this issue fail to adopt a holistic viewpoint, focusing only on part of the problem. I proposed a novel ADS-B security framework that can be extended to design various software-defined radio applications. The framework has different components. First, I introduced a methodology that leverages semantic technologies to address the security requirements definition from a systemic perspective. Second, I introduced a multi-layered framework to secure ADS-B operations, namely ADS-BSec, operated by a distributed cognitive engine that analyses location updates from a cyber-security module analyzing the authenticity and integrity of ADS-B messages and from radio-location component that traces the sources of the transmitted ADS-B messages by fusing feeds from multilateration stations. Third, the cognitive engine also takes into consideration the stringent safety requirements of commercial flights by modeling an aircraft as a hybrid cyber-physical system that encompasses the physical capabilities of the aircraft such as the continuously evolving movement that generates its fight envelope that is changed due to discrete commands. I prove that the enhancements proposed to ADS-BSec in this thesis still satisfy the stringent safety requirements imposed on air travel using Keymaera theorem prover. Finally, I validated the components of the framework through a series of comprehensive performance tests run on a testbed consisting of different radio nodes connected to each other in a radio-noise controlled chamber that has the ability to control the noise and to provide measurements in an isolated environment.