The number of unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) is projected to exponentially increase in the next few decades for a variety of civil and military uses. However, this poses significant challenges with respect to airspace integration. This paper reviews identified security vulnerabilities of the two main options for UAS communication and airspace management, aircraft communications addressing and reporting system (ACARS) and automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B). Based on a comprehensive threat model, open questions and challenges to secure communication of UAS are discussed. As the state of the art is unable to apply security functionalities, this paper presents the safety and security for UAS (S2UAS) system architecture. This novel approach incorporates relevant safety and security aspects for UAS operation, while taking the aforementioned challenges into account. S2UAS covers four essential aspects: (1) detect incoming aerospace vehicles, (2) authenticate those vehicles and establish a secure communication channel, (3) safely react to failed authentication and (4) enable collaboration such as formation flight, even if vehicles are only partially trustworthy.
With advanced video and sensing capabilities, unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used for numerous applications that involve the collaboration and autonomous operation of teams of UAVs. Yet such vehicles can be affected by cyber attacks, impacting the viability of their missions. We propose a method to conduct mission viability analysis under cyber attacks for missions that employ a team of several UAVs that share a communication network. We apply our method to a case study of a survey mission in a wildfire firefighting scenario. Within this context, we show how our method can help quantify the expected mission performance impact from an attack and determine if the mission can remain viable under various attack situations. Our method can be used both in the planning of the mission and for decision making during mission operation. Our approach to modeling attack progression and impact analysis with Petri nets is also more broadly applicable to other settings involving multiple resources that can be used interchangeably towards the same objective.
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