ADS-B was built for openness, not security — its messages are unauthenticated, so a fabricated aircraft is technically possible. The good news: spoofed broadcasts almost always betray themselves by contradicting physics or their own metadata. Here are the signals that expose them, and how AeroScope applies every one.
ADS-B messages carry no signature and no encryption, so any transmitter could, in principle, inject a fabricated position. Documented research has shown ghost aircraft, altitude tampering and velocity tampering are all feasible. That’s why a serious platform treats every broadcast as a claim to be verified, not a fact. See the basics on ADS-B technology.
Real avionics report consistent NIC/NACp/NACv/SIL quality fields. A fabricated message often sets them wrong, or claims a precision its jittery track can’t support.
DO-260BA Kalman filter predicts where the aircraft should be next. A spoof that "teleports", accelerates impossibly or violates its performance envelope fails the normalised-innovation (NIS) test.
KALMAN NISGeometric-vs-barometric altitude, ground-speed-vs-Mach and track-vs-heading should agree on a real airframe. Contradictions between them betray a fabricated record.
RESIDUALSA real aircraft is heard by several independent receivers. A target seen by only one network, or whose multi-receiver timing doesn’t add up, deserves suspicion.
CROSS-CHECKAeroScope runs a DO-260B-style 7-check plus a Kalman normalised-innovation test and the three self-consistency residuals on every aircraft, every cycle, and fuses 60+ feeds so multi-receiver agreement is a free integrity signal. Suspect aircraft are surfaced with the contributing factors shown — see signal integrity and threat scoring. None of this uses a black-box neural network; it’s built on auditable, established methods.