Unauthorized Drone Detection: Experiments and Prototypes

TL;DR

This paper evaluates three existing drone detection methods and introduces a novel encryption-based scheme to reliably identify unauthorized drones in various environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a comprehensive experimental evaluation of acoustic, RF, and visual drone detection methods and proposes a new encryption-based detection scheme for improved reliability.

Findings

Acoustic, RF, and visual detection methods have limitations in certain environments.

The encryption-based scheme enhances detection accuracy for unauthorized drones.

The proposed method effectively distinguishes unauthorized drones even with authorized ones present.

Abstract

The increase in the number of unmanned aerial vehicles a.k.a. drones pose several threats to public privacy, critical infrastructure and cyber security. Hence, detecting unauthorized drones is a significant problem which received attention in the last few years. In this paper, we present our experimental work on three drone detection methods (i.e., acoustic detection, radio frequency (RF) detection, and visual detection) to evaluate their efficacy in both indoor and outdoor environments. Owing to the limitations of these schemes, we present a novel encryption-based drone detection scheme that uses a two-stage verification of the drone's received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and the encryption key generated from the drone's position coordinates to reliably detect an unauthorized drone in the presence of authorized drones.