Analysis of encryption techniques in ACARS communications

Date 01/09/2019 - 30/11/2021
Type Privacy Protection & Cryptography, Critical Infrastructure

Partner: armasuisse
Partner contact: Martin Strohmeier
EPFL laboratory: Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory (SPRING)
EPFL contact: Prof. Carmela Troncoso, Wouter Lueks

In this collaboration (structured in two projects) we develop an automated tool to flag messages sent by planes which are suspicious of using weak encryption mechanisms. We mainly focus on detecting the use of classical ciphers like substitution and transposition ciphers. The tool flags messages and identifies the family of ciphers. We also aim to develop automated decryption techniques for the weakest ciphers.