Improving Aviation Data Communication and Storage Security using Blockchain Based Approach

Data Security and integrity remains a major challenge for the aviation industry data storage. Many data breaches have happened in the past which has directly caused financial loss to airlines and indirect losses to their customers. Blockchain and its related approaches provide decentralized security and privacy, however yet they involve significant energy, delay, and computational overhead. Security and privacy remain a major challenge for data communication between an Air Controller tower(ACT) and Flights mainly due to the immense scale of data transfer and distributed nature of this Internet of things (IoT) network. The thesis is divided into 2 parts. The first part is Aviation Data communication security wherein the model consists of three main components: Customized Digital Certificate (CC), Validator (Smart Contract), Storage (Blockchain Network). A set of new algorithms are proposed to outline various phases during communication and embedding message security. Each ACT and Flight need to be equipped with IoT devices and Validator (SC) that can send and receive validated messages and store them in the Blockchain network at both ends. This paper explores the communication realm and outlines Cryptography and Blockchain-based approaches. Extensive empirical work has been done to demonstrate that the propsed models are viable concerning confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The second part is demonstrated in paper two, wherein the model consists of 4 components: channel CA and Identity Manager, Smart contract (Validator), Channels, and Distributed Ledger. Different methods are proposed to demonstrate that the proposed models are viable concerning confidentiality, Authentication, Authorization and Data integrity.