Securing Drone Identity

Zachary Peterson
Associate Professor Computer Science Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

The future of drones and other autonomous vehicles is exciting—they promise to change the way we do business, manufacturing, travel, and delivery logistics, all while increasing convenience, lowering cost, and lessing the impact on the environment. They will also significantly transform our cityscapes and put new security pressures on the critical infrastructure to support them.  Among these pressures is the need for technologies that support secure remote identity—the ability to prove an assertion of identity from a vehicle whose operator may be many miles away (or not exist at all!). There have numerous proposals, including new rules just established by the FAA, for remotely identifying drones. Sadly, all existing schemes either ignore or leave optional the elements that secure identity, leaving open the possibility of impersonation, forgeries, and other malicious behavior. In this talk, we discuss the setting, the requirements, and the challenges in deploying a secure identity system for drones and other autonomous vehicles.