Crowdsourcing and Wireless Witnessing for Air-Traffic Communication Security

Abstract: Aviation security and secure aerial surveillance/control are crucial for the safety of air traffic. Two wireless systems widely used in this context are the Global Positioning System (GPS) and ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast). I will discuss why wireless systems like GPS and ADS-B are hard to fully secure and I will present novel mechanisms to improve air-traffic-related security at the intersection of these two systems. In particular, I will talk about (1) Crowd-GPS-Sec, a system to detect and localize GPS spoofing attacks on moving airborne targets such as UAVs or commercial airliners, and (2) ADS-B-Trust, an approach to leverage machine learning for ADS-B and GPS attack detection. These systems demonstrate the potential of sensor-based crowdsourcing and wireless witnessing for attack detection purposes in a typically rather closed industry sector.

Bio: Christina Pöpper is a tenure-track faculty of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) where she is heading the Cyber Security & Privacy (CSP) Lab. She is also the Co-PI of Research of the Center for Cyber Security (CCSAD) at NYUAD. Before joining NYUAD, she was an Assistant Professor and Head of the Information Security Group at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Christina holds a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and previously worked at the European Space Agency in Paris. Her research interest is cyber security and privacy. Focus areas are wireless and communication security, including secure localization, aviation security, and cellular network security, as well as privacy and anonymity in communication networks. Christina has been a member of the steering committee of ACM WiSec, the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, since 2018, and was TPC Co-Chair in 2018 and General Chair in 2021.