Privacy and Confidentiality Issues in Drone Operations: Challenges and Road Ahead

While drone-based civilian services and applications are appearing on the market at a high pace, recent efforts in the security and privacy community mainly focused on drone detection and neutralization when unauthorized invasions occur. Conversely, more attention must be paid to unveiling potential privacy and confidentiality threats to drone users and operators arising from using such a technology. Such threats, emerging from drones’ adoption for entertainment and business operations, are increasingly concerning due to the recently-introduced regulation on the Remote Identification of Unmanned Aircraft (Remote ID (RID)), mandating persistent disclosure of identity and location of the drone at run-time. This paper sheds some light on the aforementioned context, identifying several privacy and confidentiality threats connected to regular drone operations. Such threats originate from the nature of the drones’ ecosystem and actors and are magnified by the adoption of the RID regulation. For all the identified threats, we pinpoint similarities with issues faced in other research domains, potential solutions, and constraints owing to the drone technology, making the solutions conceived therein hardly applicable for drone-based services. The final result is a set of appealing research challenges, calling for joint efforts from Academia and industry.