Drones in cyber security environment

Abstract

Aerial unmanned vehicles (AUV) are currently used for a wide range of operations such as border surveillance, surveillance, reconnaissance, transport, aerial photography, traffic control, earth observation, communications, broadcasting and armed attacks. AUVs are presumed to be reliable, automated and autonomous machines. AUVs are extremely suitable for long missions that strain flight crews or put them to harm's way. Two advantages can be gained by eliminating the flight crew: 1) performance improves (range, endurance, increased payload and maneuverability, smaller physical size and lower observability) and; 2) the ability to take higher risks. UAV/RPAS/drone cyber security has largely focused on exploitable vulnerabilities in either the communication channels or the hardware/software stack on the vehicle. Such ttacs have focused on exploiting unencrypted communication over wireless media to implement eaves-dropping, cross-layer attacks, signal jamming, denial of service, and dropping Wi-Fi communication with ground control. Other attacks on drones involve GPS (Global Positioning System) spoofing attacks to fool the drone into moving to a different destination (possibly with the intention of hijacking the drone). In the same time UAV or drone can be a cyber attack platform. Specially equipped drone can track signals based on Wi-Fi, radio frequency identification (RFID) and the Bluetooth and 802.15 specifications (PAN/WPAN communication). Combined with a GPS capability drone correlates signals to the location where they're detected. So, the drone spy not only on phones, tablets, and computers, but also, potentially, on pacemakers, fitness bracelets, smart cards, and other electronics. Additionally, drone can function as visual tracking platforms even without the use of beacons or GPS. Swarms of small drones could soon become an important part of the modern military arsenal. The swarm idea inherently drives drones towards autonomy which allows many different kinetic and non-kinetic operations.