Impact of Pilot Jamming Attacks on Digital Aeronautical Data Communications

Digitization of wireless communications has reached aviation, requiring reliable high-throughput wireless data links. However, wireless communication systems can be attacked with jamming, threatening digital aviation. Fortunately, jamming attacks are, in practice, limited by the radio hardware and energy available to the attacker. It is therefore important for an attacker to use its energy budget efficiently to perform a practical attack.In this paper we discuss the efficiency, impact, and mitigation of jamming attacks on modern OFDM-based aeronautical communication systems. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) uses pilot symbols to estimate the channel’s frequency response which is the base of the channel equalization process. Bad channel estimation degrades the performance of the channel equalization, resulting in serious distortions of the received data frame. This makes pilot symbols an attractive target for attackers. For our analysis, we define multiple jamming strategies and analyze their performance with respect to several assumptions on the jammer’s synchronization capabilities. We show that targeted jamming attacks on pilot symbols can outperform classic jamming attacks, like broadband continuous wave jamming, not only in terms of the degradation of the system performance, but also in terms of the jamming efficiency. Finally, we discuss possible countermeasures against these types of attacks.