ATC
DEF CON Talk Warns of ATC Voice Cloning ‘Nightmare’
Audio engineer demonstrates how easy it is to replicate controllers’ voices
Air traffic control voice cloning
In this example of ATC voice-cloning, an aircraft waiting to cross an active runway is instructed to cross directly in front of the landing traffic. © DEF CON 33/Andrew Logan

At the recent DEF CON 33 conference, audio engineer Andrew Logan raised concerns about ATC voice communications. “My nightmare is that a sophisticated attacker might use AI voice cloning technology to impersonate air traffic controllers and intermittently give false clearances to cross runways, particularly in adverse weather conditions,” Logan said in his presentation.

Aviation radio is uniquely vulnerable to cloning, Logan explained, because it uses amplitude modulation (AM), is unencrypted, and can be received by anyone with a simple receiver. Handheld aviation transceivers are not expensive, and there have been cases of rogue individuals transmitting false instructions near airports, but that is not the vulnerability that Logan is focusing on. “You need line of sight for that to work,” he explained.