SECURITY AND COMMUNICATION NETWORKS Security Comm. Networks 2015; 8:740–750 Published online 7 May 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/sec.1021 RESEARCH ARTICLE Making air traffic surveillance more reliable: a new authentication framework for automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) based on online/offline identity-based signature  Joonsang Baek*, Young-ji Byon, Eman Hableel and Mahmoud Al-Qutayri Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, UAE ABSTRACT Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast is an emerging surveillance technology for the future “e-enabled” aircrafts, which will make it possible for aircrafts to share their location data with neighboring aircrafts, ground controllers, and other interested parties. In order to provide the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast communications with a high level of accuracy and integrity, a reliable authentication mechanism is required. So far, however, very few cryptographic solutions have been offered to achieve this in the literature. Even existing solutions have faced the following challenges: (i) the authentication solutions based on regular digital signature require complex management of public-key infrastructureell; and (ii) signing messages exchanged or broadcast frequently in aircraft-to-aircraft and aircraft-to-ground communication modes can cause a computational bottleneck easily. In order to address these challenges, we take a fresh approach to building up an authentication framework by introducing a new online/offline identity-based signature scheme. Our scheme will resolve the public-key infrastructure management issue by using the identities of aircrafts as public keys and will achieve a high efficiency through online/offline signature generation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEYWORDS ADS-B; security; authentication; integrity; identity-based signature; internet of things *Correspondence Joonsang Baek, Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, UAE. E-mail: joon.baek@kustar.ac.ae 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. The future e-enabled aircraft communication system The future e-enabled aircrafts equipped with advanced wireless communication systems, such as 787 recently  This paper is an extended version of the paper “An Authentication Framework for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Based on Online/Offline Identity-Based Signature” , presented at the Eight International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing (3PGCIC- 2013), Compiegne, France, October 2013. The paper has been fully revised so that the current version contains more pre- cise description of the framework, more detailed security and performance analysis, and further elaboration on the ADS-B system and its security.  The authors of this article do not have direct financial relation- ship with any commercial entities mentioned in the paper. developed by Boeing [1,2], are changing the paradigm of the air transport communications. As illustrated in Figure 1, the main building blocks of the e-enabled air- craft communications are Global Positioning System [3], automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) [4], and Internet-Protocol-Based Aeronautical Telecommuni- cation Network [5]. On-board Global Positioning System equipment in aircrafts will communicate with Global Navigation Satellite System to work out precise locations, altitudes, and speeds of the aircrafts, and the data regard- ing this information will be broadcast through on-board ADS-B systems [39]. The purpose of the communication system of the e-enabled aircraft is to provide aircrafts, ground controllers, and other involving third parties with well- structured and highly integrated information that enhances the performance of air traffic management in unpredictable and time-critical operational environments. Because flight deck crews of the e-enabled aircrafts will experi- ence the enhanced quality of situational awareness, their 740 Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.