Information Fusion for Secure Autonomous Drone Operations

In recent years, the use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), also known as drones, has been on the rise covering several areas that span from surveillance to retail delivery of goods. This proliferation can be accredited to various advances such as low-latency connectivity, fast execution of control commands, high reliability and more importantly their potential for autonomous operations. Consequently, this allowed the information fusion community to develop various methods of fusion of different types of data. However, these methods in general do not thoroughly consider the proliferation of cyber attacks targeting UAS vehicles especially for civilian and military missions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach leveraging information fusion to secure autonomous drone operations entitled Information Fusion for Secure Drone Operations (IFSDO). Our solution allows the distribution and enforcement of security policies and dynamic spectrum allocation policies to drones during all mission phases depending on the user role. IFSDO works by orchestrating different techniques including cryptography, attribute-based access control and ontological rules to allow the drone to autonomously and securely manage various types of access requests to ensure the mission can be conducted safely. We validate our findings with a case study illustrating the initial exchange of critical data between the security manager and the drone as part of a civilian package delivery mission involving several stakeholders interacting with the drones. The initial results show promising potential of success of our approach.