Towards Secure Air Traffic Surveillance: A Survey on ADS-B Threats, Existing Solutions, and Future Research

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) has transformed air traffic surveillance
systems by improving flight efficiency, reducing operational costs, and enhancing situational awareness.
Despite the protocol’s advantages, its unencrypted and open nature makes it vulnerable to significant
cybersecurity threats, including message injections, message spoofing, jamming, and message modification
attacks, which pose serious risks to aviation efficiency and safety. This research survey comprehensively
evaluates ADS-B security, analyzing its vulnerabilities, threat landscape, and mitigation methodologies.
We systematically categorize state-of-the-art security solutions, including artificial intelligence(AI)-based
intrusion detection, cryptographic approaches, signal and time-based solutions, physical-layer security, and
blockchain-based ADS-B authentication and integrity frameworks. A comparative analysis of the categorized security solutions highlights their feasibility, challenges, strengths, weaknesses, and real-world
implementation trade-offs. Furthermore, this survey paper identifies key challenges to securing ADS-B,
such as compatibility with legacy systems, regulatory constraints, and computational limitations. It outlines
future research directions to enhance ADS-B resilience. By focusing on the identified security gaps, this
research survey proposes a multi-layered and robust security method for ADS-B, ensuring modern air traffic
surveillance systems’ confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity.