UAV Security and Regulation

Robotic air vehicles, e.g., drones, are touted to be widely adopted in a variety of applications. On one hand, they are vulnerable to attacks targeting their control systems and causing undesirable crashes. On the other hand, they bring forth unique security challenges for enforcement agencies and privacy threats for public at large. In this project, we develop mechanisms to address these issues so that we could expedite the proliferation of the robotic air vehicles in increasing number of applications.

The Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), e.g., GPS in USA and Galileo in European Union, are widely utilized for localization. Unfortunately, they have been shown to be vulnerable to the spoofing attack through which the attacker can manipulate the GNSS receiver with malicious coordinates and navigate it to a malicious location. We plan to investigate the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) or NavIC for such security vulnerabilities. Further, we intend to investigate the feasibility of employing physical-layer authentication of GNSS transmitters to defend against the spoofing attack.