Blockchain as a solution to Drone Cybersecurity

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in various domains is continuously increasing. The benefits offered by UAVs enable the facilitation of functions or execution of tasks, such as search and rescue, which would otherwise be challenging or financially restrictive. Furthermore, UAVs are important for the military domain being considered as efficient weapons. Therefore, many countries and retail companies are investing in the massive production of UAVs for market as well as government purposes. Nevertheless, most UAVs in all domains, lack even basic cybersecurity mechanisms, thus, posing cybersecurity threats that significantly affect cybersecurity aspects or result in physical damage and even loss of human life. Many cybersecurity solutions have been proposed in the literature, encompassing both reactive and proactive measures, with the latter being preferable. Added to this, threat modeling emerges as an effective proactive measure with minimal cost and complexity. The current work conducts extensive and comprehensive research concerning the domain of UAVs. Initially, the paper outlines the historical development of UAVs and the different taxonomies in which they are classified according to different characteristics (e.g., number of rotors). The next sections detail a comprehensive description of the Internet of Drones (IoD) environment and the various relevant cybersecurity issues. Subsequently, the paper examines a wide range of diverse threat modeling approaches found in the literature, while it categorises relevant papers based on whether they describe solutions that integrate threat modeling or propose novel approaches for threat modeling.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is becoming increasingly widespread in many areas of human life every year. Not only military, but also civilian use of UAVs in various fields of science, industry, forestry, agronomy, cartography, ecology, and space research is hard to overestimate. For this reason, the use and development of UAVs in various fields remains extremely promising in the near future. Compared to manned vehicles, UAVs have the following advantages: no crew and no need for life support systems, large airfields; lower cost and low expenses for their development, production and operation; better weight and dimensions; high reliability and maneuverability; a wide range of specialized equipment for placement on board. UAVs are being introduced into all spheres of human life, even those where UAVs have no manned alternative. Some models of multicopters are already being used to deliver goods and extinguish fires. UAVs of new designs continue to be developed.In all areas of UAV application, the task of increasing autonomy remains relevant and important. The duration of con-tinuous operation and flight range directly affect the capabilities of the UAV, its ability to perform tasks and efficiency.UAV power consumption depends on the weight of the payload, weather conditions and drone speed. Energy consumption is a critical criterion for a drone to perform its missions and needs to be further studied. Many studies have been conducted to increase flight time by improving energy efficiency or reducing the energy consumed by the drone.Study the influence of battery parameters (capacity and weight) and propeller group (number of propellers and their diameter) on the maximum possible flight duration of UAVs of different masses.The main factors affecting the maximum flight duration of a UAV are considered. A model for calculating the power consumed by the device in the hover mode is presented. The maximum flight duration of a UAV is calculated depending on the battery capacity and weight, the number of propellers, and the diameter of the propellers for vehicles of different masses.It is shown that there is no point in increasing the battery capacity indefinitely, and there is an optimum point that depends on the ratio of the battery mass to the mass of the vehicle. It is also shown that increasing the diameter of the propellers significantly increases the flight time, while increasing their number is not as effective.

Abstract. The rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles is a challenge for applied research. Many technologies are developed and then researcher are looking up for their application in different sectors. Therefore, we decided to verify the use of the unmanned aerial vehicle for wood chips pile monitoring. We compared the use of GNSS device and unmanned aerial vehicle for volume estimation of four wood chips piles. We used DJI Phantom 3 Professional with the built-in camera and GNSS device (geoexplorer 6000). We used Agisoft photoscan for processing photos and ArcGIS for processing points. Volumes calculated from pictures were not statistically significantly different from amounts calculated from GNSS data and high correlation between them was found (p = 0.9993). We conclude that the use of unmanned aerial vehicle instead of the GNSS device does not lead to significantly different results. Tthe data collection consumed from almost 12 to 20 times less time with the use of UAV. Additionally, UAV provides documentation trough orthomosaic.

Relevance. More and more widespread use in the world, and in Ukraine in particular, is acquiring a method of applying pesticides from the air using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones). It is expected that in the global agricultural market in the period from 2018 to 2026 the growth rate of drone use will be up to +18.5%. Objective: hygienic assessment of working conditions and occupational risks when applying pesticides using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), analysis of their features and comparison with other most common types of treatment in agriculture. Materials and methods. Field studies were carried out in 2018–2021. When introducing the drug, certified equipment was used: a backpack sprayer SOLO-10, a trailed boom sprayer AMAZON 1201 UF combined with an MTZ 82.1 “Belorus” tractor, an Agras T16 unmanned aerial vehicle for spraying fields produced by DJ company, aircraft AN-2 combined with OZh-2 (with valveless liquid cut-off). Air sampling was performed using a “Typhoon” portable aspirator. Results. Analysis of calculations for the determination of inhalation for azoxystrobin (0.12 ± 0.004) and cyproconazole (54.2 ± 1.23); complex for azoxystrobin (0.52 ± 0.01) and cyproconazole (58.4 ± 1, 8) and combined (0.59 ± 0.01) risks showed that they are the highest for the signalman indicating the direction of flight to the pilot. Reliably lower risks of the negative impact of the working environment on the health of the sprayer tanker than the operator / tractor driver, aircraft pilot and signalman. Note that inhalation, percutaneous, complex and combined risks are reliably higher only for the drone tanker compared to the data for the outdoor pilot when a pesticide is introduced from the air. Conclusion. It was found that the risks for workers involved in the processing of crops by UAVs are significantly lower compared to aviation treatment, and are in the same range with the risks of other types of processing (rod, fan, knapsack).

The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and aviation integration with the help of satellite and 6G communication technologies has led to the Internet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or Internet of Drones (IoD). To host and share large amounts of drone data in real time, cloud-based IoD algorithm Cloudbased IoD is the wrong choice to reduce the weight of mobile drones. However, how to protect the sensitive drone at the fair is a matter of curiosity, and it is very difficult to break the environment where drone use is available and limited resources are available. Although our previous work in SPNCE21 (PATLDAC) developed an air-on middle of the main load of based drone data access control system with privacy policy, limited access time and user tracking, it provides conflicting and centralized cloud data storage for cloud environment and access with unreliable data. It is not reliable in terms of data access and tracking of users. To this end, we propose a blockchainbased privacy data access control (BPADAC) scheme for distributed and secure drone data sharing on cloudbased IoDs. Building on the granular, traceable, and privacypreserving drone data access capabilities of our previous work, we extend this by using blockchain and decentralized hash tables (DHT) to provide secure and reliable wireless access to humanmachine data and storage. as well as reliable and limited access guarantee mechanisms for cloud drone data sharing services. We also set up a public and denial user tracking system to prevent user abuse and deny the traitor. Finally, we propose a prototype for security analysis and performance evaluation using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain to demonstrate the feasibility of BPADAC. hash table, attributebased ciphertext encryption policy, and blockchain-based privacy-protected enabled and aware data access control Key Words: Blockchain, UAV,IoD, Distributed Hash Table, Ciphertext-Policy-Attribute-Based-Encryption, blockchainbased privacy-aware data access control

In the developing world, the trend of using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is being increased in many fields. These UAVs are now available in many different versions which ranges from children toy to military level combat equipment. Manufacturing companies are mostly mainly paying attention on reducing power consumption, high data transfer rate, less weight and more speed. However, by keeping focus on these features, most of the UAVs manufacturing companies overlook the factor of security and the risk in case of exploitation is ignored. This fact cannot be ignored that an exploited/hacked UAV with malicious intent can cause serious harm to the target in many ways. In the UAVs development, focus on the less computation power, restricted correspondence data transfer capacity, light weight data carrying limit and robustness captivity in UAVs has become a challenge for security practitioners and researchers. UAVs use numerous communication protocols and one among these protocols is Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) link protocol which is reliable as well as efficient. Currently, there are two versions of MAVlink communication protocol called MAVlink1 and MAVlink2. This protocol is used to establish a communication between Ground Control Station and UAV. The second version of this protocol (i.e. MAVlink2) is recent and there is not much data available about the potential exploitable vulnerabilities present in this protocol. This research paper has explored and identified security vulnerabilities in MAVlink2, specifically linked to the communication of UAV and their impact on UAV. The paper has further analyzed MAVlink2 communication protocol in order to exploit the vulnerabilities in the MAVlink2 protocol for hijacking the UAV.

In view of the potentials and benefits of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil and surveillance applications, such as forest fire monitoring and fighting, earthquake and natural disasters monitoring and sensing etc., the cooperative flight of multiple UAVs has been paid more and more attention. Among the applications of multiple UAVs in cooperative flight, fault-tolerant cooperative localization against global positioning system (GPS) signal loss due to GPS receiver malfunction is one of key techniques for various practical applications. The current research on fault-tolerant cooperative localization of UAVs is mainly based on the distance between UAVs. However, cooperative localization based on the azimuth angles between UAVs has not been generally researched so far. This paper aims to solve the problem of fault-tolerant cooperative localization of UAVs by introducing the azimuth angles between UAVs. Firstly, the basic localization model is established and the formulas of localization in two and three dimensional coordinate systems are derived. Then the optimal reference planes are chosen with the principle of minimum horizontal dilution of positioning (HDOP). Kalman filter is applied to decrease the influence of observation errors on localization. Kalman filter and extended Kalman filter are designed against linear and non-linear systems, respectively. Finally, the simulation results indicate that the cooperative localization based on the azimuth angles achieves high localization accuracy.

Pesticide spray drift and risk assessment using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sprayer and traditional electric knapsack sprayer (EKS).

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the construction industry is swiftly growing worldwide. UAVs are changing the way construction companies do business. Contractors are increasingly using camera-mounted UAVs to monitor the full range of activities. Rapid advances in camera, sensing, aeronautics, battery and autopilot navigation technologies have helped make UAVs affordable, reliable and easy to operate. The US Federal Aviation Administration predicts that UAVs hold tremendous promise and commercial drone sales could increase from 600,000 to 2.7 million over the next four years. On the one hand, UAVs are extremely cost-effective in conducting aerial surveys, worksite surveillance, real-time inspections, and monitoring jobsite safety. On the other hand, with UAV ownership rapidly rising, the number of reported UAV safety, risk, and liability incidents is increasing. With this new technology use in the construction industry, construction companies must be aware of all regulations, legislations, privacy liability, and risks for construction related businesses. Operating a drone or hiring a subcontractor to operate it is not something to do on the spur of the moment. Emphasis and effort should be placed on safety, risk control, training and education. The goal of this paper is to provide construction professionals with timely and pertinent information on UAV use with a focus on risk management based on current industry practice, experience and literature review.

In this paper, the effective use of flight-time constrained unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying base stations that provide wireless service to ground users is investigated. In particular, a novel framework for optimizing the performance of such UAV-based wireless systems in terms of the average number of bits (data service) transmitted to users as well as the UAVs' hover duration (i.e. flight time) is proposed. In the considered model, UAVs hover over a given geographical area to serve ground users that are distributed within the area based on an arbitrary spatial distribution function. In this case, two practical scenarios are considered. In the first scenario, based on the maximum possible hover times of UAVs, the average data service delivered to the users under a fair resource allocation scheme is maximized by finding the optimal cell partitions associated to the UAVs. Using the powerful mathematical framework of optimal transport theory, this cell partitioning problem is proved to be equivalent to a convex optimization problem. Subsequently, a gradient-based algorithm is proposed for optimally partitioning the geographical area based on the users' distribution, hover times, and locations of the UAVs. In the second scenario, given the load requirements of ground users, the minimum average hover time that the UAVs need for completely servicing their ground users is derived. To this end, first, an optimal bandwidth allocation scheme for serving the users is proposed. Then, given this optimal bandwidth allocation, optimal cell partitions associated with the UAVs are derived by exploiting the optimal transport theory. Simulation results show that our proposed cell partitioning approach leads to a significantly higher fairness among the users compared with the classical weighted Voronoi diagram. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the average hover time of the UAVs can be reduced by 64% by adopting the proposed optimal bandwidth allocation scheme as well as the optimal cell partitioning approach. In addition, our results reveal an inherent tradeoff between the hover time of UAVs and bandwidth efficiency while serving the ground users.

Currently, the pervasive cooperation of a group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has gained a lot of attention and use for its low price and widespread availability. For drones from different network domains to cooperate with each other, temporary Internet of Drones (IoD) is needed. The collaboration with drones requires frequent identity verification. However, owing to unreliable environment and weak connectivity of the IoD. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are weak in energy, computing, cross-domain and memory resources. It is very difficult to design an efficient and the complete authentication scheme without abundant computing and memory resources. The conventional authentication methods are not suitable for IoD, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) needs online and high bandwidth resources, at the same time, the construction and operation and maintenance costs of certificate authority (CA) are very high; Identity-Based Cryptograph (IBC) using a lot of operational resources, is a “heavy” algorithm, and in different domains (private key distribution from different Private Key Generator (PKG)) is difficult to authenticate each other. This paper proposes a two-layer lightweight key management scheme based on Unified Multi-domain Identity (UMI), which implement cross-domain authentication, effectively reduce the computing and traffic brought by public key certificate verification which is especially suitable for UAVs network. Finally, through verification, the scheme has better performance and security than other schemes.KeywordsUnmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)Key authenticationPublic-key cryptographyInternet of Drones (IoD)

The article reveals the peculiarities of using unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance in the field in wartime. The article reveals the essence and content of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance, as well as the conditions and features of their effective use. Study of the possibilities of using unmanned to conduct reconnaissance on the ground in wartime conditions has shown that this technology has great potential to improve operational intelligence and ensuring the safety of military personnel. The advantages of using unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance are obvious. They can quickly and efficiently penetrate enemy territory, collect information territory, collect information and transmit it in real time. This makes it possible to Reduce the risk to the lives of servicemen, as they do not need to go to the front line the front line to conduct reconnaissance. In addition, unmanned aerial vehicles can operate in hazardous environments, such as radioactive contamination or chemicals where humans cannot enter. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles also ensures greater accuracy and objectivity in collecting information. They are equipped with various types of sensors, such as high-resolution cameras, thermal cameras, radars, etc., which provide detailed information about the territory, enemy positions and movements. This significantly improves the quality of intelligence and allows for more informed decisions on further actions. In summary, research has shown that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance in wartime has significant potential. They can collect information quickly, efficiently and safely, improving operational intelligence and ensuring the safety of soldiers. However, further research and development of new technologies is needed to improve the functionality and safety of unmanned aerial vehicles in warfare.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an emerging technology for 3D Earth modelling and mapping. UAVs collect aerial images that are used to generate orthophotos with the assistance of navigation systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) and telemetry monitors at the Ground Control Station (GSC) for monitoring and controlling the UAV in autonomous flight. However, precision is critical in UAV photogrammetry mapping (PMg) to present acceptable precision measurements of the captured images that closely related to Ground Sample Distance (GSD) as most survey works are gradually shifting away from conventional surveying equipment such as total station and theodolite which has good precision measurement. This study focuses on the application of UAVs at close-range topography and mapping of land slope. Flight through the slope will vary in terms of flying altitude, affecting the GSD’s value for each slope height. The accuracy of PMg for land slope is subsequently assessed by evaluating the accuracy of slope mapping, particularly the slope height derived from Digital Elevation Model (DEM), Digital Surface Model (DSM) of orthophotos and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) survey. This is due to the fact that most PMg is done on almost exclusively horizontal areas, and the GSD change value acquired remains the same. The purpose of this study is to analyze the accuracy of PMg of land slope by land slope mapping at 100m flight high above ground level. the RMSE recorded for x and y coordinate were (RMSEx = 0.654198cm) and (RMSEy = 0.668516cm) while for elevation error was (RMSEz = 0.512062cm). This study’s output is to help and assist authorities in construction planning, particularly during the cutting and filling process; to determine the precise amount of earth required for construction; and control the cost of earthwork.

Automated Papaya Farm Monitoring system using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

Historic buildings have been damaged by natural events and human hands for centuries. For this reason, the importance of studies on the preservation, documentation and restoration of historical buildings is increasing worldwide. In addition, technological opportunities are also becoming necessary for carrying out more comprehensive studies on the sustainability of historical buildings. Studies on modelling many cultural heritage (CH) works worldwide continue. Precise data about the structure must be obtained to evaluate these models in reconstruction studies. In parallel with technological developments, the measurement sensitivity of devices in this field has also increased. In addition, different technological tools that will assist in measurement activities are entering our lives daily. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are one of them. 3D data from UAVs and photogrammetric systems are sensitive data obtained quickly and cheaply. This data provides the opportunity to be used in interdisciplinary studies. This study investigates the use of UAVs in the digital documentation study of the Ancient City of Kilistra in Konya/Gökyurt. The study showed that UAVs are more practical and effective than traditional measurement techniques. It has been revealed that, if appropriate conditions are provided, UAVs can be a suitable alternative in terms of time and cost in documenting CH sites. Finally, it has been determined that the high-resolution digital maps obtained not only speed up the process of documenting large areas but also provide advantages in accuracy and precision.