ADS-B Replay Attacks
Capturing, storing, modifying and replaying ADS-B data is a trivial task. It would be a simple matter to launch a man-in-the-middle attack against an aircraft in flight, and using a high gain yagi antenna aimed at a particular aircraft, the attacker could create any traffic display scenario he would like the pilot to see, whether 1000 aircraft or none.
This is not merely theoretical but a demonstrable fact. This is ECM 101
Since these transmissions are not encrypted they are vulnerable to mischief. All aircraft communications are sent in the clear and equally vulnerable. For less than $10,000 you can jam out an ILS and substitute your own if your desire is to guide an airplane to a threshold of your choosing. VOR DME is laughingly easy to spoof.
While the TSA is busy confiscating shampoo, it's very easy to acquire the computer and radio gear needed to inject malicious signals into the nav data stream. Since these important signals are neither encrypted or authenticated, this is a massive security vulnerability waiting for exploit.
I suspect this technology is already in the wild and may explain one or more puzzling air crashes...
Does anyone know of work being done to close this hole? Why has no attention been paid to securing our exposed radio navigation signals?
TIA.