Abstract:

Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System （ACARS）is the main method of communication in civil aviation of China. ACARS air-ground datalink is quite important for aviation security，while the datalink system is not secure enough since lacking of adequate research on it. With regard to the shortcuts of entity authentication method in ACARS，and on the basis of analyzing the risks existing in the datalink，this paper studies the digital certificate authentication method based on the elliptic curve cryptography during the secure session initiation process between the ground and aircraft entity，then designs and implements a certificate authority for signing and managing certificates based on OpenSSL in aviation ground-air datalink，and finally completes the authentication between ground and aircraft before the secure session. Analyses show that the digital certificate authentication method used in ACARS improves the security of the system，without impacting on system performance.

Key words: aircraft communication addressing and reporting system(ACARS), digital certificate, authentication, elliptic curve