On Jamming Attacks in Crowdsourced Air Traffic Surveillance

Wireless jamming has been a long-standing issue both in critical infrastructure research and real-world applications, with particular importance in systems that deal with long communication distances and low received signal strength. Air traffic control is one such system, experiencing a rising number of reports of outside interference with the underlying wireless technologies. In this article, we discuss the particular issue of malicious wireless jamming on crowdsourced networks of low-cost ADS-B receivers, which increasingly support modern air traffic management. Using both simulation and laboratory trials, we first show the practical impact of reduced reception and coverage of typical receivers in a crowdsourced sensor network. Following this, we investigate network-wide countermeasures based on redundant coverage, which can defend at most 50.74% of the evaluated real-world network. To improve jamming resilience in nonredundant areas, we analyze and implement a low-cost multichannel receiver and show that it can effectively recover up to 50% of the messages even under heavy jamming conditions.