Efficient Remote Identification for Drone Swarms

With the advancement of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)technology,the market for drones and the cooperation of many drones are expanding.Drone swarms move together in multiple regions to perform their tasks.A Ground Control Server(GCS)located in each region identifies drone swarmmembers to prevent unauthorized drones from trespassing.Studies on drone identification have been actively conducted,but existing studies did not consider multiple drone identification environments.Thus,developing a secure and effective identification mechanism for drone swarms is necessary.We suggested a novel approach for the remote identification of drone swarms.For an efficient identification process between the drone swarm and the GCS,each Reader drone in the region collects the identification information of the drone swarmand submits it to the GCS for verification.The proposed identification protocol reduces the verification time for a drone swarm by utilizing batch verification to verify numerous drones in a drone swarmsimultaneously.To prove the security and correctness of the proposed protocol,we conducted a formal security verification using ProVerif,an automatic cryptographic protocol verifier.We also implemented a non-flying drone swarmprototype usingmultiple Raspberry Pis to evaluate the proposed protocol’s computational overhead and effectiveness.We showed simulation results regarding various drone simulation scenarios.

Optimization of Air Defense System Deployment Against Reconnaissance Drone Swarms

Due to their advantages in flexibility,scalability,survivability,and cost-effectiveness,drone swarms have been increasingly used for reconnaissance tasks and have posed great challenges to their opponents on modern battlefields.This paper studies an optimization problem for deploying air defense systems against reconnaissance drone swarms.Given a set of available air defense systems,the problem determines the location of each air defense system in a predetermined region,such that the cost for enemy drones to pass through the region would be maximized.The cost is calculated based on a counterpart drone path planning problem.To solve this adversarial problem,we first propose an exact iterative search algorithm for small-size problem instances,and then propose an evolutionary framework that uses a specific encoding-decoding scheme for large-size problem instances.We implement the evolutionary framework with six popular evolutionary algorithms.Computational experiments on a set of different test instances validate the effectiveness of our approach for defending against reconnaissance drone swarms.

A Survey on Sensor-and Communication-Based Issues of Autonomous UAVs

The application field for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology and its adoption rate have been increasingsteadily in the past years. Decreasing cost of commercial drones has enabled their use at a scale broader thanever before. However, increasing the complexity of UAVs and decreasing the cost, both contribute to a lack ofimplemented securitymeasures and raise new security and safety concerns. For instance, the issue of implausible ortampered UAV sensor measurements is barely addressed in the current research literature and thus, requires moreattention from the research community. The goal of this survey is to extensively review state-of-the-art literatureregarding common sensor- and communication-based vulnerabilities, existing threats, and active or passive cyberattacksagainst UAVs, as well as shed light on the research gaps in the literature. In this work, we describe theUnmanned Aerial System (UAS) architecture to point out the origination sources for security and safety issues.Weevaluate the coverage and completeness of each related research work in a comprehensive comparison table as wellas classify the threats, vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks into sensor-based and communication-based categories.Additionally, for each individual cyber-attack, we describe existing countermeasures or detectionmechanisms andprovide a list of requirements to ensureUAV’s security and safety.We also address the problem of implausible sensormeasurements and introduce the idea of a plausibility check for sensor data. By doing so, we discover additionalmeasures to improve security and safety and report on a research niche that is not well represented in the currentresearch literature.