Exploring the Vulnerabilities of Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) Through Software Defined Radio (SDR) Exploitation

Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) are safety-critical systems that are deployed on most commercial aircraft in service today. However, TCAS transactions were not designed to account for malicious actors. While in the past it may have been infeasible for an attacker to craft arbitrary radio signals, attackers today have access to open-source digital signal processing software like GNU Radio and inexpensive Software Define Radios (SDR). Therefore, this thesis presents motivation through analytical and experimental means for more investigation into TCAS from a security perspective. Methods for analyzing TCAS both qualitatively and quantitatively from an adversarial perspective are presented, and an experimental attack is developed in GNU Radio to perform an attack in a well-defined threat model.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Berges, Paul Martin

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Gerdes, Ryan M.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Reed, Jeffrey H.
• Clancy, Thomas Charles III

• Cyber-Physical
• Security
• TCAS
• SSR
• SDR

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:20681

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/90165