Unfolding Challenges in Securing and Regulating Unmanned Air Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper reviews the security challenges of UAVs, analyzes existing countermeasures, identifies research gaps, and discusses regulatory requirements for deploying secure large-scale UAV networks.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of UAV security threats, evaluates current countermeasures, and highlights key research gaps and regulatory challenges for civilian drone deployment.

Findings

Identified key security threats to UAVs.

Evaluated effectiveness of existing countermeasures.

Outlined future research directions and regulatory needs.

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are being introduced in a wide range of commercial applications. This has also made them prime targets of attackers who compromise their fundamental security properties, including confidentiality, integrity, and availability. As researchers discover novel threat vectors in UAVs, the government and industry are increasingly concerned about their limited ability to secure and regulate UAVs and their usage. With the aim of unfolding a path for a large-scale commercial UAV network deployment, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art study and examine the prevailing security challenges. Unlike the prior art, we focus on uncovering the research gaps that must be addressed to enforce security policy regulations in civilian off-the-shelf drone systems. To that end, we first examine the known security threats to UAVs based on their impact and effectiveness. We then analyze existing countermeasures to prevent, detect, and respond to these threats in terms of security and performance overhead. We further outline the future research directions for securing UAVs. Finally, we establish the fundamental requirements and highlight critical research challenges in introducing a regulatory entity to achieve a secure and regulated UAV network.