Fooled into following a hacker's rogue commands, a drone is liable to do any number of things. Fly erratically. Speed up. Slow down. Hang suspended in the air. Reverse course. Take a new course. And, most dangerously: Crash.
What the compromised drone cannot do, however, is regain control. Lost to its original assignment – whether it's delivering a package, inspecting an aging bridge or monitoring the health of crops – the machine is essentially useless.
At FIU, cybersecurity researchers have developed a series of countermeasures to fight back mid-flight against hostile takeovers.
Because drones are essentially flying computers, they are subject to the same software and hardware exploitation as their land-bound counterparts. But current drone-defense techniques fail to monitor all possible vulnerabilities.
FIU's technology, called SHIELD, is different. Keeping watch over the entire control system, it picks up on subtle cues of malicious activity. It then identifies the kind of attack — even the stealthiest ones that often slip under the radar — before launching an attack-specific recovery process. The findings were presented at the prestigious IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks.
"Without robust recovery mechanisms, a drone cannot complete its mission under attacks, because even if it is possible to detect the attacks, the mission often gets terminated as a fail-safe move," said Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman, lead researcher and associate professor in FIU's Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences.
"What's important about our framework is that it helps the system recover, so the mission can be completed."
Safeguarding the security of drones may soon become more important than ever before. This summer, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed expanding commercial drone use across industries. From Amazon deliveries to agriculture, the FAA expects more businesses to deploy unmanned aircraft, raising questions about safety in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
What you'll learn in this story
- As drones become increasingly common in U.S. skies – delivering packages, inspecting bridges, even monitoring crops – the danger of cyberattacks has grown too.
- FIU computer scientists developed a comprehensive cybersecurity framework, called SHIELD, that monitors the entire drone control system.
SHIELD detects subtle signs of attack — including hardware anomalies like battery surges or processor overload — and uses machine learning to classify the threat and initiate a tailored recovery process, allowing the drone to continue its mission.
