Creating an Encrypted ADS-B Plane Spotter with a Raspberry Pi, RTL-SDR and SSL

These days it’s quite easy to share your ADS-B reception on the internet with giant worldwide aggregation sites like flightaware.com and flightradar24.com. These sites aggregate received ADS-B plane location data received by RTL-SDR users from all around the world and display it all together on a web based map.

However, what if you don’t want to share your data on these sites but still want to share it over the internet with friends or others without directly revealing your IP address? Some of the team at beame.io have uploaded a post that shows how to use their beame.io service to securely share your ADS-B reception over the internet. Beame.io appears to be a service that can be used to expose local network applications to the internet via secure HTTPS tunneling. Essentially this can allow someone to connect to a service on your PC (e.g. ADS-B mapping), without you revealing your public IP address and therefore exposing your PC to hacking.

On their post they show how to set up the RTL-SDR compatible dump1090 ADS-B decoder on a Raspberry Pi, and then connect it to their beame-instal-ssl service.