13. Role of Cyber Security in Drone Technology

Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are cyber-physical systems (CPS) meaning an integration of computation, networking, and physical processes. The main technology components of drones are physical structural airframe, propulsion system, embedded computing systems (ECS) such as ground control station (GCS), autopilot system, virtual radio link, multiple payloads, launch and recovery system. Drones systems are reliant on virtual cyber network and embedded computational system for their operation. Cyber security is meant for protecting technologies and processes. An attacker may misuse or manipulate the sensor input or functions, or he may simply disable them to cause denial of service attacks and make unwanted failsafe mechanisms. The drone has been identified as vulnerable to cyber-attacks because of their uniqueness of network and dispersed physical systems located in remote places and because of the cyber-attacks which can result in the defective operation of the control loop, denial of service, destruction and exfiltration, and information corruption. Hence, two important concerns need to be addressed for drones are cyber airworthiness safety and cyber reliability as well as security. In this paper, recent attack and failure of drones, drone network architecture, cyber security is introduced. Role of cyber security, standards, challenges, and requirements are presented.