But like radar technology, ADS-B currently relies on ground stations to relay information, making it useless over remote areas.
Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ADS-B.
FORBES: Next-Gen Air Traffic Control Vulnerable To Hackers Spoofing Planes Out Of Thin Air
An FAA ADS-B security action plan identified and mitigated risks and monitors the progress of corrective action.
FORBES: Next-Gen Air Traffic Control Vulnerable To Hackers Spoofing Planes Out Of Thin Air
One of the biggest challenges was writing software to integrate ADS-B with an older, less sophisticated collision-avoidance system.
Even with ADS-B, jets will be restricted to narrow lanes to reduce the complexity of air traffic control.
The system is called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, and, like all good technology, is elegant in its simplicity.
As with so many technologies, the tools to exploit ADS-B are becoming cheaper and more accessible all the time.
FORBES: Next-Gen Air Traffic Control Vulnerable To Hackers Spoofing Planes Out Of Thin Air
Aircraft equipped with ADS-B are able to automatically send highly precise data, such as aircraft positioning and speed, to air traffic controllers every second.
The contract for the ADS-B ground station network requires continual independent validation of the accuracy and reliability of ADS-B and aircraft avionics signals.
FORBES: Next-Gen Air Traffic Control Vulnerable To Hackers Spoofing Planes Out Of Thin Air
ADS-B alerts pilots to a potential collision much sooner, but the FAA still requires the old system and doesn't allow competing displays in the cockpit.
For pilots, ADS-B's presence in the cockpit is a revolution.
Just as the personal computer freed workers from the tyranny of the mainframe and its persnickety administrators, ADS-B frees pilots from relying on ground controllers to dictate their every maneuver.
ADS-B is a big step toward what the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration calls "free flight, " in which commercial pilots will be free to determine their own routes to minimize time and fuel usage.
Each onboard ADS-B set consists of a Global Positioning System satellite navigation unit, two Pentium microprocessors, some software and a radio transmitter-receiver--not much more gear than you would find behind the dash of a new Cadillac.
ADS-B promises to make air traffic control easier, cheaper and in many ways safer by allowing planes to transmit their locations by radio frequency instead of depending on towers to use radar to track and coordinate them.
FORBES: Next-Gen Air Traffic Control Vulnerable To Hackers Spoofing Planes Out Of Thin Air
Continental Airlines (nyse: CAL - news - people ) is testing similar technology on its transatlantic flights, and Federal Express, Airborne Freight (nyse: ABF - news - people ) and other freight carriers have participated in earlier ADS-B tests.
And both researchers say that ADS-B lacks both the encryption necessary to keep those communications private and the authentication necessary to prevent spoofed communications from mixing with real ones, potentially allowing hackers to fabricate messages and even entire aircraft with radio tools that are cheaper and more accessible than ever before.
FORBES: Next-Gen Air Traffic Control Vulnerable To Hackers Spoofing Planes Out Of Thin Air
In a presentation at the Black Hat and Defcon security conference in July, for instance, French security researcher Andre Costin presented vulnerabilities in the next-generation air traffic control system known as ADS-B that he said would allow a hacker with a software-defined radio to track and even spoof planes in the sky, potentially creating dangerous distractions for pilots.
FORBES: DARPA-Funded Radio HackRF Aims To Be A $300 Wireless Swiss Army Knife For Hackers
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