Publications

Rigorous scientific experimentation in system and network security remains an elusive goal. Recent work has outlined three basic requirements for experiments, namely that hypotheses must be falsifiable, experiments must be controllable, and experiments must be repeatable and reproducible. Despite their simplicity, these goals are difficult to achieve, especially when dealing...

The paper describes an algorithm for constructing convective weather avoidance polygons. The algorithm combines weather avoidance fields (WAF) from the en route convective weather avoidance model (CWAM) with edges automatically detected in the echo tops field, clustering, convex hull fitting and wind data to build weather avoidance polygons. Results for...

This paper presents the results of a study to quantify the performance of Weather Avoidance Fields in predicting the operational impact of convective weather on en route airspace. The Convective Weather Avoidance Model identifies regions of convective weather that pilots are likely to avoid based upon an examination of the...

This paper presents a benefits assessment methodology for an air traffic control tower advanced automation system called the Tower Flight Data Manager (TFDM), which is being considered for development by the FAA to support NextGen operations. The standard FAA benefits analysis methodology is described, together with how it has been...

Many aviation safety studies involve estimating near mid-air collision (NMAC) rate. In the past, it has been assumed that the probability that an NMAC leads to a mid-air collision is 0.1, but there has not yet been a comprehensive study to serve as a basis for this estimate. This paper...

Whenever machine learning is used to prevent illegal or unsanctioned activity and there is an economic incentive, adversaries will attempt to circumvent the protection provided. Constraints on how adversaries can manipulate training and test data for classifiers used to detect suspicious behavior make problems in this area tractable and interesting...

TCAS behavior in New England airspace is being monitored and analyzed, making use of an omni-directional 1030/1090 MHz receiver. The receiver system, located in Lexington, MA, and operated by M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, is used to record Resolution Advisories (RAs). Omni-directional receptions make it possible to examine the air-to-air messages exchanged...

Before unmanned aircraft can fly safely in civil airspace, robust airborne collision avoidance systems must be developed. Instead of hand-crafting a collision avoidance algorithm for every combination of sensor and aircraft configuration, we investigate the automatic generation of collision avoidance algorithms given models of aircraft dynamics, sensor performance, and intruder...

Mitigating thunderstorm wind-shear threats for aircraft near the ground has been an important issue since the 1970s, when several fatal commercial aviation accidents were attributed to wind shear. Updating the knowledge base for airport wind-shear exposure and effectiveness of detection systems has become critical to the Federal Aviation Administration as...

We have designed and implemented a general-purpose cryptographic building block, called GROK, for securing communication among groups of entities in networks composed of high-latency, low-bandwidth, intermittently connected links. During the process, we solved a number of non-trivial system problems. This paper describes these problems and our solutions, and motivates and...