On the Feasibility of Exploiting Traffic Collision Avoidance System Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) are safety-critical systems required on most commercial aircrafts in service today. However, TCAS was not designed to account for malicious actors. While in the past it may have been infeasible for an attacker to craft radio signals to mimic TCAS signals, attackers today have access to open-source digital signal processing software, like GNU Radio, and inexpensive software defined radios (SDR) that enable the transmission of spurious TCAS messages. In this paper, methods, both qualitative and quantitative, for analyzing TCAS from an adversarial perspective are presented. To demonstrate the feasibility of inducing near mid-air collisions between current day TCAS-equipped aircraft, an experimental Phantom Aircraft generator is developed using GNU Radio and an SDR against a realistic threat model.