Encryption of air picture that is transmitted through civil air traffic control radars? ground to ground lines

Nowadays, cryptography is becoming a key factor for information security.Most of the data that we don?t care may take attention of others. Civil Air Traffic ControlRadars? ground to ground communication is one of them. This communication is veryimportant for flight safety and includes sensitive data to be protected. Any uncontrolledchange and break on communication may cause unexpected catastrophe in the skies. Inorder to prevent any accident which may occur as a result of unprotected data, the airpicture communication between Civil Air Traffic Control Center and radars can beencrypted and decrypted with software based tools before sending and receiving airpicture. In this study, Advanced Encryption Standard algoritm is selected as symetricencryption algoritm for data transfer and RSA (Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and LeonardAdleman) algoritm is selected as public encryption algoritm for key transfer.The findings of the study show that the air picture between Civil Air TrafficControl Center and radars can be encrypted with software tools without causing anyunacceptable delay to provide information security and fligt safety.Keywords: Air Traffic Control Center, Air Picture, Encryption, Symmetric Encryption,Public Key Encryption.