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A domain-specific language to design false data injection tests for air traffic control systems

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Abstract

The ADS-B—automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast—technology requires aircraft to broadcast their position and velocity periodically. As compared to legacy radar technologies, coupled with alarming cyber security issues (the ADS-B protocol provides no encryption nor identification), the reliance on aircraft to communicate this surveillance information exposes air transport to new cyber security threats, and especially to FDIAs—false data injection attacks—where an attacker modifies, blocks, or emits fake ADS-B messages to dupe controllers and surveillance systems. This paper is part of an ongoing research initiative toward the generation of FDIA test scenarios and focuses on supporting the test design activity, i.e., supporting ATC experts to meticulously craft test cases in order to assess the resilience of surveillance systems against FDIAs. To achieve this goal, we propose a complete and powerful domain-specific language (DSL), close to natural language, that provides a large expressiveness to support ATC business experts in creating FDIA’s test scenarios. We demonstrate the design capabilities of this approach and its productivity gain with respect to manually creating the FDIAs test scenarios.

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Notes

  1. http://www.boeing.com/commercial/market/current-market-outlook-2017/.

  2. https://www.uavionix.com/products/skybeacon/.

  3. https://hackaday.com/2019/06/09/gps-and-ads-b-problems-cause-cancelled-flights/.

  4. https://flywithscout.com.

  5. https://www.eurocontrol.int/news/artas-surveillance-tracker-programme-goes-further.

  6. https://www.eurocontrol.int/services/asterix.

  7. https://www.smartesting.com.

  8. https://www.kereval.com/.

  9. http://wiki.modesbeast.com/Mode-S_Beast:Contents.

  10. http://woodair.net/sbs/Article/Barebones42_Socket_Data.htm.

  11. The source code of the alteration engine is available on GitHub: https://github.com/aymeric-cr/sbs-generation.

  12. https://www.mak.com/products/simulate/vr-forces.

  13. https://www.scalable-networks.com/exatacyber.

  14. https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/.

  15. https://opensky-network.org/.

  16. https://protege.stanford.edu.

  17. https://www.stardog.com/studio.

  18. https://www.topquadrant.com/products/topbraid-composer/.

  19. The OWL file is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/aymeric-cr/dsl-scenario/blob/master/fdit-dsl-ontology.owl.

  20. http://users.monash.edu/~lloyd/tildeProgLang/Grammar/Arith-Exp/.

  21. https://github.com/aymeric-cr/dsl-scenario.

  22. https://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/.

  23. https://openjfx.io/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is part of an ongoing research initiative toward the generation of FDIA test scenarios partially supported by the GeLeaD ANR ASTRID Project & the EIPHI Graduate school (Contract “ANR-17-EURE-0002”).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FEMTO-ST inst., Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comté, CNRS, 16 Route de Gray, 25030, Besançon, cedex, France

    Alexandre Vernotte, Aymeric Cretin, Bruno Legeard & Fabien Peureux

  2. Smartesting Solutions & Services, Besançon, France

    Bruno Legeard & Fabien Peureux

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  1. Alexandre Vernotte
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Correspondence to Aymeric Cretin.

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Appendix A: Ontology inheritance tree

Appendix A: Ontology inheritance tree

All the entities that were identified and modeled into the DSL’s ontology during the domain analysis activity (see Sect. 5) are depicted in Figs. 21, 22 and 23. More importantly, the figures show the inheritance relationships between entities. Note that as there is a unique Thing entity from which all other entities directly or indirectly inherit from (similarly to the Object class in Java), the tree was originally depicted in a single figure. But for obvious space reasons, that figure was eventually split into three.

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Ontology inheritance tree 1/3

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Fig. 22
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Ontology inheritance tree 2/3

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Fig. 23
figure 23

Ontology inheritance tree 3/3

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Vernotte, A., Cretin, A., Legeard, B. et al. A domain-specific language to design false data injection tests for air traffic control systems. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 24, 127–158 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-021-00604-4

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