As a pilot and cybersecurity researcher, I am very interested of the nexus between aviation and security. To explore this interest, I developed a device called Fly Catcher - a device that detects for aircraft spoofing by monitoring for malicious ADS-B signals in the 1090MHz frequency. The device consists of a 1090 MHz antenna, a Flight Aware RTL SDR, a custom 3D printed case, a portable battery charger, and a MicroUSB cable. The device receives ADS-B information from the antenna and the software-defined radio, which is then passed into a Convolutional Neural Network written with Python to detect whether or not the aircraft is spoofed. I trained the neural network on a dataset of valid ADS-B signals as well as a generated spoofed set of aircraft signals, to teach Fly Catcher how to detect and flag any suspicious ADS-B signals. It does this by checking for discrepancies in the signal's characteristics, such as its location, velocity, and identification. The result outputted by the neural network is then displayed onto a radar screen allowing users to detect spoofed aircraft near them. To test the device, I brought it with me for an hour-long flight to scan for a wide variety of aircraft enroute. After the flight, the data was fed into the Neural Network to analyze any spoofed aircraft I might have encountered.
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