Biblio

With the advent of the Internet era, all walks of life in our country have undergone earth-shaking changes, especially the drone and geographic information industries, which have developed rapidly under the impetus of the Internet of Things era. However, with the continuous development of science and technology, the network structure has become more and more complex, and the types of network attacks have varied. UAV information security and geographic information data have appeared security risks on the network. These hidden dangers have contributed to the progress of the drone and geographic information industry. And development has caused a great negative impact. In this regard, this article will conduct research on the network security of UAV systems and geographic information data, which can effectively assess the network security risks of UAV systems, and propose several solutions to potential safety hazards to reduce UAV networks. Security risks and losses provide a reference for UAV system data security.

With the inundation of more cost effective and improved flight performance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into the consumer market, we have seen more uses of these for both leisure and business purposes. As such, demand for digital forensic examination on these devices has seen an increase as well. This research will explore and discuss the forensic examination process on one of the more popular brands of UAV in Singapore, namely DJI. The findings are from the examination of the exposed File Transfer Protocol (FTP) channel and the extraction of the Data-at-Rest on the memory chip of the drone. The extraction was done using the Chip-Off and Chip-On technique.

This paper deals with the implementation of robust control, based on the finite time Lyapunov stability theory, to solve the trajectory tracking problem of an unconventional quadrotor with rotating arms (also known as foldable drone). First, the model of this Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) taking into consideration the variation of the inertia, the Center of Gravity (CoG) and the control matrix is presented. The theoretical foundations of backstepping control enhanced by a Super-Twisting (ST) algorithm are then discussed. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. Finally, a qualitative and quantitative comparative study is made between the proposed controller and the classical backstepping controller. Overall, the results obtained show that the proposed control approach provides better performance in terms of accuracy and resilience.

The high maneuverability of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), facilitating fast and flexible deployment of communication infrastructures, brings potentially valuable opportunities to the future wireless communication industry. Nevertheless, UAV communication networks are faced with severe security challenges since air to ground (A2G) communications are more vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks than terrestrial communications. To solve the problem, we propose a coding scheme that hierarchically utilizes polar codes in order to address channel multi-state variation for UAV wiretap channels, without the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) known at the transmitter. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the scheme achieves the security capacity of the channel and meets the conditions of reliability and security.

On the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide significant operational advantages. However, the exploitation of the UAV by an untrustworthy entity might lead to security violations or possibly the destruction of crucial IoBT network functionality. The IoBT system has substantial issues related to data tampering and fabrication through illegal access. This paper proposes the use of an intelligent architecture called IoBT-Net, which is built on a convolution neural network (CNN) and connected with blockchain technology, to identify and trace illicit UAV in the IoBT system. Data storage on the blockchain ledger is protected from unauthorized access, data tampering, and invasions. Conveniently, this paper presents a low complexity and robustly performed CNN called LRCANet to estimate AOA for object localization. The proposed LRCANet is efficiently designed with two core modules, called GFPU and stacks, which are cleverly organized with regular and point convolution layers, a max pool layer, and a ReLU layer associated with residual connectivity. Furthermore, the effectiveness of LRCANET is evaluated by various network and array configurations, RMSE, and compared with the accuracy and complexity of the existing state-of-the-art. Additionally, the implementation of tailored drone-based consensus is evaluated in terms of three major classes and compared with the other existing consensus.

The military operations in low communications infrastructure scenarios employ flexible solutions to optimize the data processing cycle using situational awareness systems, guaranteeing interoperability and assisting in all processes of decision-making. This paper presents an architecture for the integration of Command, Control, Computing, Communication, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems (C4ISR), developed within the scope of the Brazilian Ministry of Defense, in the context of operations with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) - swarm drones - and the Internet-to-the-battlefield (IoBT) concept. This solution comprises the following intelligent subsystems embedded in UAV: STFANET, an SDN-Based Topology Management for Flying Ad Hoc Network focusing drone swarms operations, developed by University of Rio Grande do Sul; Interoperability of Command and Control (INTERC2), an intelligent communication middleware developed by Brazilian Navy; A Mission-Oriented Sensors Array (MOSA), which provides the automatization of data acquisition, data fusion, and data sharing, developed by Brazilian Army; The In-Flight Awareness Augmentation System (IFA2S), which was developed to increase the safety navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), developed by Brazilian Air Force; Data Mining Techniques to optimize the MOSA with data patterns; and an adaptive-collaborative system, composed of a Software Defined Radio (SDR), to solve the identification of electromagnetic signals and a Geographical Information System (GIS) to organize the information processed. This research proposes, as a main contribution in this conceptual phase, an application that describes the premises for increasing the capacity of sensing threats in the low structured zones, such as the Amazon rainforest, using existing communications solutions of Brazilian defense monitoring systems.

Using multi-UAV systems to accomplish both civil and military missions is becoming a popular trend. With the development of software and hardware technologies, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now able to operate autonomously at edge. However, the remote control of manned systems, e.g., ground control station (GCS), remains essential to mission success, and the system's control and non-payload communication (CNPC) are facing severe cyber threats caused by smart attacks. To avoid hijacking, in this paper, we propose a secure mechanism that reduces such security risks for multi-UAV systems. We introduce friendly jamming from UAVs to block eavesdropping on the remote control channel. The trade-off between security and energy consumption is optimized by three approaches designed for UAV and GCS under algorithms of different complexities. Numerical results show the approach efficiency under different mission conditions and security demands, and demonstrate the features of the proposed mechanism for various scenarios.

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has been advocated to provide diverse data-centric services including data relay, content caching and computing task offloading in vehicular networks due to their flexibility and conveniences. Since only offloading computing tasks to edge computing devices (ECDs) can not meet the real-time demand of vehicles in peak traffic flow, this paper proposes to combine edge computing and UAV swarm for cooperative task offloading in vehicular networks. Specifically, we first design a cooperative task offloading framework that vehicles' computing tasks can be executed locally, offloaded to UAV swarm, or offloaded to ECDs. Then, the selection of offloading strategy is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, the object of which is to maximize the utility of the vehicle. To solve the problem, we further decompose the original problem into two subproblems: minimizing the completion time when offloading to UAV swarm and optimizing the computing resources when offloading to ECD. For offloading to UAV swarm, the computing task will be split into multiple subtasks that are offloaded to different UAVs simultaneously for parallel computing. A Q-learning based iterative algorithm is proposed to minimize the computing task's completion time by equalizing the completion time of its subtasks assigned to each UAV. For offloading to ECDs, a gradient descent algorithm is used to optimally allocate computing resources for offloaded tasks. Extensive simulations are lastly conducted to demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the utility of vehicles compared with conventional schemes.

This work describes a top down systems security requirements analysis approach for understanding and eliciting security requirements for a notional small unmanned aerial system (SUAS). More specifically, the System-Theoretic Process Analysis approach for Security (STPA-Sec) is used to understand and elicit systems security requirements. The effort employs STPA-Sec on a notional SUAS system case study to detail the development of functional-level security requirements, design-level engineering considerations, and architectural-level security specification criteria early in the system life cycle when the solution trade-space is largest rather than merely examining components and adding protections during system operation or sustainment. These details were elaborated during a semester independent study research effort by two United States Air Force Academy Systems Engineering cadets, guided by their instructor and a series of working group sessions with UAS operators and subject matter experts. This work provides insight into a viable systems security requirements analysis approach which results in traceable security, safety, and resiliency requirements that can be designed-for, built-to, and verified with confidence.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based cognitive radio (CR) systems improve the sensing performance. However, such systems demand secure communication with lower power consumption. Motivated by these observations, we consider an energy-constraint yet energy harvesting (EH) drone flying periodically in the circular track around primary transmitter in the presence of an eavesdropper with an aim to use the licensed band opportunistically. Considering the trade-off between the residual energy and secondary link performance, we formulate the constrained optimization problem, i.e., maximizing residual energy under the constraint of secondary secrecy outage. Simulation results verify the proposed theoretical analysis.

We use potential fields tuned by genetic algorithms to dynamically reconFigure unmanned aerial vehicles networks to serve user bandwidth needs. Such flying network base stations have applications in the many domains needing quick temporary networked communications capabilities such as search and rescue in remote areas and security and defense in overwatch and scouting. Starting with an initial deployment that covers an area and discovers how users are distributed across this area of interest, tuned potential fields specify subsequent movement. A genetic algorithm tunes potential field parameters to reposition UAVs to create and maintain a mesh network that maximizes user bandwidth coverage and network lifetime. Results show that our evolutionary adaptive network deployment algorithm outperforms the current state of the art by better repositioning the unmanned aerial vehicles to provide longer coverage lifetimes while serving bandwidth requirements. The parameters found by the genetic algorithm on four training scenarios with different user distributions lead to better performance than achieved by the state of the art. Furthermore, these parameters also lead to superior performance in three never before seen scenarios indicating that our algorithm finds parameter values that generalize to new scenarios with different user distributions.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) also known as drones are being used in many applications where they can record or stream videos. One interesting application is the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and public safety applications where drones record videos and send them to a control center for further analysis. These videos are shared by various clients such as law enforcement or emergency personnel. In such cases, the recording might include faces of civilians or other sensitive information that might pose privacy concerns. While the video can be encrypted and stored in the cloud that way, it can still be accessed once the keys are exposed to third parties which is completely insecure. To prevent such insecurity, in this paper, we propose proxy re-encryption based sharing scheme to enable third parties to access only limited videos without having the original encryption key. The costly pairing operations in proxy re-encryption are not used to allow rapid access and delivery of the surveillance videos to third parties. The key management is handled by a trusted control center, which acts as the proxy to re-encrypt the data. We implemented and tested the approach in a realistic simulation environment using different resolutions under ns-3. The implementation results and comparisons indicate that there is an acceptable overhead while it can still preserve the privacy of drivers and passengers.

Complex CPS such as UAS got rapid development these years, but also became vulnerable to GPS spoofing, packets injection, buffer-overflow and other malicious attacks. Ensuring the behaviors of UAS always keeping secure no matter how the environment changes, would be a prospective direction for UAS security. This paper aims at presenting a reactive synthesis-based approach to implement the automatic generation of secure UAS controller. First, we study the operating mechanism of UAS and construct a high-Ievel model consisting of actuator and monitor. Besides, we analyze the security threats of UAS from the perspective of hardware, software and data transmission, and then extract the corresponding specifications of security properties with LTL formulas. Based on the UAS model and security specifications, the controller can be constructed by GR(1) synthesis algorithm, which is a two-player game process between UAV and Environment. Finally, we expand the function of LTLMoP platform to construct the automatons for controller in multi-robots system, which provides secure behavior strategies under several typical UAS attack scenarios.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a widely adopted standard robotic middleware. However, its preliminary design is devoid of any network security features. Military grade unmanned systems must be guarded against network threats. ROS 2 is built upon the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard and is designed to provide solutions to identified ROS 1 security vulnerabilities by incorporating authentication, encryption, and process profile features, which rely on public key infrastructure. The Department of Defense is looking to use ROS 2 for its military-centric robotics platform. This paper seeks to demonstrate that ROS 2 and its DDS security architecture can serve as a functional platform for use in military grade unmanned systems, particularly in unmanned Naval aerial swarms. In this paper, we focus on the viability of ROS 2 to safeguard communications between swarms and a ground control station (GCS). We test ROS 2's ability to mitigate and withstand certain cyber threats, specifically that of rogue nodes injecting unauthorized data and accessing services that will disable parts of the UAV swarm. We use the Gazebo robotics simulator to target individual UAVs to ascertain the effectiveness of our attack vectors under specific conditions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ROS 2 in mitigating the chosen attack vectors but observed a measurable operational delay within our simulations.

In this study we propose a novel method for drone surveillance that can simultaneously analyze time-frequency responses in all pixels of a high-frame-rate video. The propellers of flying drones rotate at hundreds of Hz and their principal vibration frequency components are much higher than those of their background objects. To separate the pixels around a drone's propellers from its background, we utilize these time-series features for vibration source localization with pixel-level short-time Fourier transform (STFT). We verify the relationship between the number of taps in the STFT computation and the performance of our algorithm, including the execution time and the localization accuracy, by conducting experiments under various conditions, such as degraded appearance, weather, and defocused blur. The robustness of the proposed algorithm is also verified by localizing a flying multi-copter in real-time in an outdoor scenario.

With the emergence of new digital trends like Internet of Things (IoT), more industry actors and technical committees pursue research in utilising such technologies as they promise a better and optimised management, improved energy efficiency and a better quality living through a wide array of value-added services. However, as sensing, actuation, communication and control become increasingly more sophisticated, such promising data-driven systems generate, process, and exchange larger amounts of security-critical and privacy-sensitive data, which makes them attractive targets of attacks. In turn this affirms the importance of trustworthiness in IoT and emphasises the need of a solid technical and regulatory foundation. The goal of this paper is to first introduce the concept of trustworthiness in IoT, its main pillars namely, security, privacy and data protection, and then analyse the state-of-the-art in research and standardisation for each of these subareas. Throughout the paper, we develop and refer to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a promising value-added service example of mobile IoT devices. The paper then presents a thorough gap analysis and concludes with recommendations for future work.

Naval Battlefield Network communications rely on wireless network technologies to transmit data between different naval entities, such as ships and shore nodes. Existing naval battle networks heavily depend on the satellite communication system using single-path TCP for reliable, non-interactive data. While satisfactory for traditional use cases, this communication model may be inadequate for outlier cases, such as those arising from satellite failure and wireless signal outage. To promote network stability and assurance in such scenarios, the addition of unmanned aerial vehicles to function as relay points can complement network connectivity and alleviate potential strains in adverse conditions. The inherent mobility of aerial vehicles coupled with existing source node movements, however, leads to frequent network handovers with non-negligible overhead and communication interruption, particularly in the present single-path model. In this paper, we propose a solution based on multi-path TCP and software-defined networking, which, when applied to mobile wireless heterogeneous networks, reduces the network handover delay and improves the total throughput for transmissions among various naval entities at sea and littoral. In case of single link failure, the presence of a connectable relay point maintains TCP connectivity and reduces the risk of service interruption. To validate feasibility and to evaluate performance of our solution, we constructed a Mininet- WiFi emulation testbed. Compared against single-path TCP communication methods, execution of the testbed when configured to use multi-path TCP and UAV relays yields demonstrably more stable network handovers with relatively low overhead, greater reliability of network connectivity, and higher overall end-to-end throughput. Because the SDN global controller dynamically adjusts allocations per user, the solution effectively eliminates link congestion and promotes more efficient bandwidth utilization.

In this paper, we present results from a human-subject study designed to explore two facets of human mental models of robots - inferred capability and intention - and their relationship to overall trust and eventual decisions. In particular, we examine delegation situations characterized by uncertainty, and explore how inferred capability and intention are applied across different tasks. We develop an online survey where human participants decide whether to delegate control to a simulated UAV agent. Our study shows that human estimations of robot capability and intent correlate strongly with overall self-reported trust. However, overall trust is not independently sufficient to determine whether a human will decide to trust (delegate) a given task to a robot. Instead, our study reveals that estimations of robot intention, capability, and overall trust are integrated when deciding to delegate. From a broader perspective, these results suggest that calibrating overall trust alone is insufficient; to make correct decisions, humans need (and use) multi-faceted mental models when collaborating with robots across multiple contexts.

The goal of this work was to identify and try to solve some of the vulnerabilities present in the AR Drone 2.0 by Parrot. The approach was to identify how the system worked, find and analyze vulnerabilities and flaws in the system as a whole and in the software, and find solutions to those problems. Analyzing the results of some tests showed that the system has an open WiFi network and the communication between the controller and the drone are unencrypted. Analyzing the Linux operating system that the drone uses, we see that "Pairing Mode" is the only way the system protects itself from unauthorized control. This is a feature that can be easily bypassed. Port scans reveal that the system has all the ports for its services open and exposed. This makes it susceptible to attacks like DoS and takeover. This research also focuses on some of the software vulnerabilities, such as Busybox that the drone runs. Lastly, this paper discuses some of the possible methods that can be used to secure the drone. These methods include securing the messages via SSH Tunnel, closing unused ports, and re-implementing the software used by the drone and the controller.

UAANET (UAV Ad hoc Network) is defined as an autonomous system made of swarm of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and GCS (Ground Control Station). Compared to other types of MANET (Mobile Ad hoc network), UAANET have some unique features and bring several challenges. One of them is the design of routing protocol. It must be efficient for creating routes between nodes and dynamically adjusting to the rapidly changing topology. It must also be secure to protect the integrity of the network against malicious attackers. In this paper, we will present the architecture and the performance evaluation (based on both real-life experimental and emulation studies) of a secure routing protocol called SUAP (Secure UAV Ad hoc routing Protocol). SUAP ensures routing services between nodes to exchange real-time traffic and also guarantees message authentication and integrity to protect the network integrity. Additional security mechanisms were added to detect Wormhole attacks. Wormhole attacks represent a high level of risk for UAV ad hoc network and this is the reason why we choose to focus on this specific multi node attack. Through performance evaluation campaign, our results show that SUAP ensures the expected security services against different types of attacks while providing an acceptable quality of service for real-time data exchanges.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly accessible to the public due to their high availability with affordable prices while being equipped with better technology. However, this raises a great concern from both the cyber and physical security perspectives since UAVs can be utilized for malicious activities in order to exploit vulnerabilities by spying on private properties, critical areas or to carry dangerous objects such as explosives which makes them a great threat to the society. Drone identification is considered the first step in a multi-procedural process in securing physical infrastructure against this threat. In this paper, we present drone detection and identification methods using deep learning techniques such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN). These algorithms will be utilized to exploit the unique acoustic fingerprints of the flying drones in order to detect and identify them. We propose a comparison between the performance of different neural networks based on our dataset which features audio recorded samples of drone activities. The major contribution of our work is to validate the usage of these methodologies of drone detection and identification in real life scenarios and to provide a robust comparison of the performance between different deep neural network algorithms for this application. In addition, we are releasing the dataset of drone audio clips for the research community for further analysis.

With rapid advances in the fields of the Internet of Things and autonomous systems, the network security of cyber-physical systems(CPS) becomes more and more important. This paper focuses on the real-time security evaluation for unmanned aircraft systems which are cyber-physical systems relying on information communication and control system to achieve autonomous decision making. Our problem formulation is motivated by scenarios involving autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) working continuously under data-driven attacks when in an open, uncertain, and even hostile environment. Firstly, we investigated the state estimation method in CPS integrated with data-driven attacks model, and then proposed a real-time security scoring algorithm to evaluate the security condition of unmanned aircraft systems under different threat patterns, considering the vulnerability of the systems and consequences brought by data attacks. Our simulation in a UAV illustrated the efficiency and reliability of the algorithm.

Rapid inspection and assessment of critical infrastructure after man-made and natural disasters is a matter of homeland security. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate the potential of leveraging small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS) in support of the rapid recovery of critical infrastructure in the aftermath of catastrophic events. We propose our data collection, detection and assessment system, using a sUAS equipped with a Lidar and a camera. This method provides a solution in fast post-disaster response and assists human responders in damage investigation.

The usage of small drones/UAVs has significantly increased recently. Consequently, there is a rising potential of small drones being misused for illegal activities such as terrorism, smuggling of drugs, etc. posing high-security risks. Hence, tracking and surveillance of drones are essential to prevent security breaches. The similarity in the appearance of small drone and birds in complex background makes it challenging to detect drones in surveillance videos. This paper addresses the challenge of detecting small drones in surveillance videos using popular and advanced deep learning-based object detection methods. Different CNN-based architectures such as ResNet-101 and Inception with Faster-RCNN, as well as Single Shot Detector (SSD) model was used for experiments. Due to sparse data available for experiments, pre-trained models were used while training the CNNs using transfer learning. Best results were obtained from experiments using Faster-RCNN with the base architecture of ResNet-101. Experimental analysis on different CNN architectures is presented in the paper, along with the visual analysis of the test dataset.

In this work, we synthesize collaboration protocols for human-unmanned aerial vehicle (H-UAV) command and control systems, where the human operator aids in securing the UAV by intermittently performing geolocation tasks to confirm its reported location. We first present a stochastic game-based model for the system that accounts for both the operator and an adversary capable of launching stealthy false-data injection attacks, causing the UAV to deviate from its path. We also describe a synthesis challenge due to the UAV's hidden-information constraint. Next, we perform human experiments using a developed RESCHU-SA testbed to recognize the geolocation strategies that operators adopt. Furthermore, we deploy machine learning techniques on the collected experimental data to predict the correctness of a geolocation task at a given location based on its geographical features. By representing the model as a delayed-action game and formalizing the system objectives, we utilize off-the-shelf model checkers to synthesize protocols for the human-UAV coalition that satisfy these objectives. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the H-UAV protocol synthesis through a case study where the protocols are experimentally analyzed and further evaluated by human operators.