The market for civilian unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, is expanding rapidly as new applications are emerging to incorporate the use of civilian drones in our daily lives. On one hand, the convenience of offering certain services via drones is attractive. On the other hand, the mere operation of these airborne machines, which rely heavily on their cyber capabilities, poses great threats to people and property. Also, while the Federal Aviation Administration NextGen project aims to integrate civilian drones into the national airspace, the regulation is still a work-in-progress and does not cope with their threats. This article surveys the main security, privacy, and safety aspects associated with the use of civilian drones in the national airspace. In particular, we identify both the physical and cyber threats of such systems and discuss the security properties required by their critical operation environment. We also identify the research challenges and possible future directions in the fields of civilian drone security, safety, and privacy. Based on our investigation, we forecast that security will be a central enabling technology for the next generation of civilian unmanned aerial vehicles.
The new culture of networked systems that offer everywhere accessible services has given rise to various types of security tradeoffs. In fact, with the evolution of physical systems that keep getting integrated with cyber frameworks, cyber threats have far more critical effects as they get reflected on the physical environment. As a result, the issue of security of cyber physical systems requires a special holistic treatment. In this paper, we study the tradeoff between security, safety, and availability in such systems and demonstrate these concepts on implantable medical devices as a case study. We discuss the challenges and constraints associated with securing such systems and focus on the tradeoff between security measures required for blocking unauthorized access to the device and the safety of the patient in emergency situations where such measures must be dropped to allow access. We analyze the up to date proposed solutions and discuss their strengths and limitations.INDEX TERMS Access control, cyber physical systems, implantable medical devices, security vs. safety.
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