OnBoard Security, a Wilmington, Massachusetts-based security provider, announced last week that graduate students from Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute (JHUISI) have successfully implemented a secured type of sense-and-avoid (SAA) technology for drones to prevent mid-air collisions that is not as vulnerable to cyber-attacks as other prior SAA technologies. The JHUISI team knew that they had to enhance the way that drones share their locations to make them less vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The JHUISI team decided to use automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) –that is, a surveillance technology in which an aircraft determines its position via satellite navigation and periodically broadcasts it, enabling it to be tracked. It is dependent in that it depends on data from the aircraft’s navigation system. To prevent attacks through the drone’s ADS-B system, the JHUISI team developed a security-augmented ADS-B system using a cryptographic software library developed by OnBoard. Using technology like this, drones will be less susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks and message modification. This method of security will not only be useful to drone operations, but may play a role in self-driven cars as well. To read the full paper from the JHUISI team, click here.

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