When Air Traffic Management Meets Blockchain Technology: a Blockchain-based concept for securing the sharing of Flight Data

Abstract

The Aviation Industry has been booming for several decades and is expected to keep growing in the future. Therefore, Air Traffic Management (ATM) tools are likely to be soon overwhelmed by the demand. The Single European Sky ATM Research Program (SESAR) 2020, controlled by EUROCONTROL, intends to revisit the management of aeronautical information along its full lifecycle and across the whole European ATM system. The efficient sharing of information over large scale Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) is a non-trivial problem that raises several challenges including data lineage, data consistency, access rights management and privacy-preservation. Part of the SESAR initiative, System-Wide Information Management (SWIM) project defines standards to enhance the security of aeronautical data shared among stakeholders. Most of its propositions include centralized or partially centralized mechanisms in order to enforce data confidentiality, and privacy. In this paper, we intend to discuss how blockchains can improve the sharing of sensitive data over the ATM system. More specifically, we use the example of flight data and describe a high-level Blockchain-based concept that mimics the decentralized nature of existing A TM system to provide a reliable, distributed storage platform for flight information.