Enhancing aviation safety: Machine learning for real-time ADS-B injection detection through advanced data analysis

Airplanes play a critical role in global transportation, ensuring the efficient movement of people and goods. Although generally safe, aviation systems occasionally encounter incidents and accidents that underscore the need for proactive risk management. This study employs machine learning to detect abnormalities in commercial aircraft operations using Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) data. Given the growing reliance on ADS-B technology, concerns regarding its susceptibility to security breaches, such as injection attacks, have intensified. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose a robust ADS-B injection detection system. Employing GridSearchCV for model optimization, it effectively identifies and categorizes injection risks. The system’s performance, evaluated using the ADS-B Message Injection Attacks Dataset, achieves outstanding results, including a value of 0.9970 for the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The proposed classifier also demonstrates a higher area under the curve (0.9999), specificity (0.9956), and Cohen’s kappa (0.9954) than existing approaches, while achieving a lower log loss (0.0107). This research significantly enhances aviation security by introducing a highly accurate, computationally efficient, and reliable real-time detection model for ADS-B injection attacks, ensuring the integrity and resilience of modern flight control systems.