Security News > 2020 > November > Radio Frequency fingerprinting of aircraft ADS-B transmitters? Boffins reckon they've cracked it

In a paper titled "Real-World ADS-B signal recognition based on Radio Frequency Fingerprinting," three Chinese researchers describe what they said was a method of identifying unique transmitters fitted to aircraft - regardless of what identity code the equipment is broadcasting.

ADS-B transmitters work by broadcasting the aircraft's GPS location along with a unique identifier, issued by the registering country's authorities.

Through applying a convolutional neural network to ADS-B data gathered from five aircraft, researchers Haoran Zha, Qiao Tian and Yun Lin, all from China's Harbin Engineering University, reckoned they were able to successfully differentiate and classify each aircraft's ADS-B RF emissions.

Apart from the small number of aircraft in the sample, said Smith, there was no indication that the 500 signals harvested from all five aircraft had been captured while the aeroplane was in flight, or from different locations and ranges.

It may be abortive for now, but if the technique is expanded and verified to be capable of working in near-real time, it could pose an extra headache for nation states and others looking to camouflage their aircraft among others.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/11/10/adsb_fingerprinting_research/