Alice in the Sky - On Security of Air Traffic Control Communication
Joachim Posegga, Inst. of IT-Security and Security Law, University of Passau

Air Traffic Control (ATC) communication recently received considerable attention, on one hand because of incidents like the disappearing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370, but also due to published hacking attacks on the technical components underlying ATC such as ADS-B.

The talk will sketch the overall setting and architecture of todays ATC communication systems. We will discover an application area that is largely unknown in the IT-Security community, despite that it has some fascinating, real-world research perspective: ATC communication has been around for decades in the form of technically "closed" system dominated by aviation-specific safety requirements; today, ATC is facing tremendous security challenges since the underlying assumption that the system is "closed" is barely justified any more.

The talk will take an IT-Security perspective and outline the ATC communication attack surface, discuss some ATC-specific security challenges, and show how these relate to the aviation-specific safety requirements.