A survey of cyber security threats and solutions for UAV communications and flying ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a rapidly evolving technology, and being highly mobile, UAV systems are able to cooperate with each other to accomplish a wide range of different tasks. UAVs can be used in commercial applications, such as goods delivery, as well as in military surveillance. They can also operate in civil domains like search-and-rescue missions, that require multiple UAVs to collect location data as well as transmit video streams. However, the malicious use of UAVs began to emerge in recent years. The frequency of such attacks has been significantly increasing and their impact can have devastating effects. Hence, the relevant industries and standardisation bodies are exploring possibilities for securing UAV systems and networks.Our survey focuses on UAV security and privacy issues whilst establishing flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) as well as on threats to the Internet of drones (IoD) infrastructure used to provide control and access over the Internet between UAVs and users. The goal of this survey is to categorise the versatile aspects of the UAV threat landscape and develop a classification approach based on different types of connections and nodes in FANETs and IoD. In particular, we categorise security and privacy threats on connections between UAVs, ground control stations, and personal pilot devices. All the most relevant threats and their corresponding defence mechanisms are classified using characteristics of the first four layers of the OSI model. We then analyse the conventional and novel UAV routing protocols, indicating their advantages and disadvantages from the cyber security perspective. To provide a deeper insight, the reviewed defence mechanisms have undergone a thorough examination of their security requirements and objectives such as availability, authentication, authorisation, confidentiality, integrity, privacy, and non-repudiation. Finally, we discuss the open research challenges, the limitations of current UAV standards, and provide possible future directions for research.