Communications of the ACM
Cybersecurity Concept For Unmanned Systems
Researchers are improving the defenses of unmanned aerial vehicles against cyberattack.
Credit: Help Net Security
Researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed the System-Aware Cybersecurity concept and Secure Sentinel technology to improve defenses for unmanned aerial vehicles against cyberattacks.
"Our research focuses on providing additional security by employing an on-board secure monitoring subsystem to detect illogical behaviors relative to the expected profile of a system's performance," says UVA professor Barry Horowitz.
In a recent demonstration of the project, the researchers emulated several threat scenarios, including ground-based cyberattacks, insider-initiated attacks, and supply chain interdictions. The attack scenarios focused on global-positioning system-embedded data manipulations, waypoint manipulations originating from the ground or onboard sources, manipulation of critical metadata related to transmitted imagery and onboard surveillance, and payload control breaches. The inflight testing measured the efficacy of the countermeasure technology in hardening the unmanned system's cyber agility and resiliency under attack conditions. The researchers found the System-Aware Secure Sentinel technology was able to rapidly detect, inform, and correct system performance in response to the emulated cyberattacks.
"The success of these flight demonstrations reflects on the quality and relevance of the advanced research being conducted here at UVA," says UVA's Michael P. Straightiff.
From Help Net Security
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Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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