A Security Framework for a Drone Delivery Service

Abstract

Delivery drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) utilized to transport packages, food, medicine, or other goods. With high demand for a prompt and efficient delivery, a drone delivery system can be an effective solution for timely deliveries and especially for emergency management. However, current delivery drone systems lack crucial security functions. Drones may have to operate in unsupervised hostile areas, and therefore be vulnerable to physical capture in addition to conventional cyber attacks. A captured drone can be analyzed by a white-box attack model in which the attacker has full control over the execution environment of cryptographic modules in static and dynamic methods including all side-channel information. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a security framework which utilizes white-box cryptography in order to protect critical data and cryptographic keys in delivery drones from white-box attacks. The experimental results show that the proposed framework is cost effective in terms of resource usage and thus is suitable even for resource-limited UAV.