Towards Successful Realization of the LDACS Cybersecurity Architecture: An Updated Datalink Security Threat- and Risk Analysis

Kurzfassung

Civil air traffic has been growing considerably in recent years and air traffic is expected to double by 2025 compared to 2008. Thus legacy systems in air traffic management (ATM) are expected to reach their capacity limits and the need for new aeronautical communication technologies becomes apparent. Especially problematic is the saturation of VHF band in high density areas in Europe, the US and Asia. To make the use of spectrum more efficient a transition from analogue voice to digital data communication is necessary to cope with the expected growth. A promising candidate for long range terrestrial communications, already in the process of being standardized in ICAO, is the L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS). LDACS is a terrestrial digital wireless communication system for civil operational aeronautical safety-of-life communication and based on 3G and 4G technologies, adapted for safety critical infrastructure requirements and deployed as an inlay system in the L-band next to DME. With the augmentation of analogue systems by digital substitutes and the related trend towards an increased autonomous data processing LDACS requires a thorough cybersecurity analysis and cybersecurity architectural design, similar to the ones used in 3G, 4G or AeroMACS, to be successfully deployed. In previous work we presented a preliminary draft of a cybersecurity architecture for LDACS, which regarded special requirements of the LDACS environment such as narrow frequency ranges and limited bandwidth. However, also a reasonable low overhead of security data, will be key for further progress towards LDACS security specification and standardization. Thus the main objective of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of the LDACS cy-bersecurity architecture with a suggestion of different protocols and algorithms and to compare the state of LDACS cybersecurity robustness with and without security additions.