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

International audienceThe Aviation industry has been booming for severaldecades and is expected to keep growing in the future. Therefore,Air Traffic Management (ATM) tools are likely to be soonoverwhelmed by the demand. The Single European Sky ATMResearch Program (SESAR) 2020, controlled byEUROCONTROL, intends to revisit the management ofaeronautical information along its full lifecycle and across thewhole European ATM system. The efficient sharing ofinformation over large scale cyber physical systems is a non-trivialproblem that raises several challenges including data lineage, dataconsistency, access rights management, and many more. Part ofthe SESAR initiative, System-Wide Information Management(SWIM) project defines standards to enhance the security ofaeronautical data shared among stakeholders. Most of itspropositions include centralized or partially centralizedmechanisms in order to enforce data confidentiality, and privacy.In this paper, we intend to discuss how blockchains can improvethe sharing of sensitive data over the ATM system. Morespecifically, we use the example of flight data and describe a highlevelBlockchain-based concept that mimics the decentralizednature of existing ATM system to provide a reliable, distributedstorage platform for flight information