ADS-B Tree-Chain: A Tree-Chain Authentication Scheme for Protecting ADS-B Data Security

As a widely deployed aeronautical surveillance technology, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) has become vulnerable to various security threats due to its reliance on plaintext data transmission through open protocols and unencrypted communication channels. Existing security schemes for ADS-B systems face significant challenges, including high communication overhead and excessive computational delay. To address these limitations and achieve efficient lightweight authentication for ADS-B data, this study proposes a novel intra-inter chain framework. Building upon this framework, a tree-chain authentication scheme using SM3 and SM9 cryptographic algorithms is desiged. This scheme organizes ADS-B data packets into authentication chains, employs a tree hash model for hash generation, and constructs a shared signature for multiple chains. Comprehensive theoretical analysis and extensive experiments are conducted to validate the scheme's functionality and evaluate its performance. Experimental results show that our authentication scheme can effectively defend against ADS-B data spoofing attacks. Compared with other existing authentication schemes, the proposed scheme reduces communication overhead by approximately 19.3% and decreases hash/signature generation time and data verification delays by at least 42.8% and 16.5%, respectively. Moreover, the scheme maintains a verification probability of 98.7% even under high packet loss conditions, exhibiting exceptional robustness. This study provides a practical and efficient solution to enhance the security of ADS-B surveillance systems.