  The integration of air and ground smart vehicles is becoming a new paradigm
of future transportation. A decent number of smart unmanned vehicles or UAS
will be sharing the national airspace for various purposes, such as express
delivery, surveillance, etc. However, the proliferation of UAS also brings
challenges considering the safe integration of them into the current Air
Traffic Management (ATM) systems. Especially when the current Automatic
Dependent Surveillance Broadcasting (ADS-B) systems do not have message
authentication mechanisms, it can not distinguish whether an authorized UAS is
using the corresponding airspace. In this paper, we aim to address these
practical challenges in two folds. We first use blockchain to provide a secure
authentication platform for flight plan approval and sharing between the
existing ATM facilities. We then use the fountain code to encode the
authentication payloads and adapt them into the de facto communication protocol
of ATM. This maintains backward compatibility and ensures the verification
success rate under the noisy broadcasting channel. We simulate the realistic
wireless communication scenarios and theoretically prove that our proposed
authentication framework is with low latency and highly compatible with
existing ATM communication protocols.
