A Robot Operating System Framework for Secure UAV Communications

Abstract

To perform advanced operations with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it is crucial that components other than the existing ones such as flight controller, network devices, and GCS are used. The feature of obstacle avoidance is added to the pre-existing simple waypoint missions to ensure the commercialization of UAVs. However, this feature requires additional hardware and software to recognize obstacles based on radar or lidar. The inevitable addition of components to accomplish this functionality may lead to security vulnerabilities through various vectors. Hence, we propose a security framework in this study to improve the security of UAS. The proposed framework operates in the ROS (robot operating system) and is designed to focus on several perspectives such as overhead arising from additional security elements and security issues essential for flight missions. The UAS is operated in a non-native and native ROS environment. The performance of the proposed framework in both environments is verified through experiments.