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Security, Privacy, and Safety Aspects of Civilian Drones: A Survey

Published: 09 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The market for civilian unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, is expanding rapidly as new applications are emerging to incorporate the use of civilian drones in our daily lives. On one hand, the convenience of offering certain services via drones is attractive. On the other hand, the mere operation of these airborne machines, which rely heavily on their cyber capabilities, poses great threats to people and property. Also, while the Federal Aviation Administration NextGen project aims to integrate civilian drones into the national airspace, the regulation is still a work-in-progress and does not cope with their threats. This article surveys the main security, privacy, and safety aspects associated with the use of civilian drones in the national airspace. In particular, we identify both the physical and cyber threats of such systems and discuss the security properties required by their critical operation environment. We also identify the research challenges and possible future directions in the fields of civilian drone security, safety, and privacy. Based on our investigation, we forecast that security will be a central enabling technology for the next generation of civilian unmanned aerial vehicles.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems
ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems  Volume 1, Issue 2
April 2017
214 pages
ISSN:2378-962X
EISSN:2378-9638
DOI:10.1145/3015781
  • Editor:
  • Tei-Wei Kuo
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 09 November 2016
Accepted: 01 September 2016
Revised: 01 August 2016
Received: 01 February 2016
Published in TCPS Volume 1, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Unmanned aerial vehicles
  2. civilain drones
  3. cyber-physical systems
  4. parcelcopters
  5. privacy
  6. safety
  7. security

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