Recent IT outages and cyber-attacks on air transportation networks illustrate just how vulnerable U.S. air passenger networks are to cyber-attacks. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Charles Harry, in the school of public policy at the University of Maryland. We develop methods to quantify the impacts of cyber-attacks on passenger transportation, specifically modeling the loss of capacity and propagation of delays. We do this through detailed air flight data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and agent based modeling applied to air transportation networks. The video above visualizes cascading flight delays in a hypothetical cyber-attack scenario that disrupts the ATL Hartsfield-Jackson airport for the duration of one hour.

 

We find that targeted attacks on vendors that perform seemingly non-essential functions such as weight checks, for multiple airlines, are nontheless particularly concerning weak points of air transport networks, reminiscent of recent vendor attacks in other critical infrastructure systems, such as the SolarWinds breach. Our work was recently published at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict, Cycon 2021.

​

• Strategic Cyber Effects in Complex Systems: Understanding the US Air Transportation Sector, Published: Cycon 2021.