Cyber Security Perspectives in Public Spaces: Drone Case Study

Introduction

In a nutshell, drones are aircraft that operate with or without humans onboard. They were introduced mainly for military operations. However, their application was extended to political, social, and economic settings and it has impacted the public both positively and negatively (Majeed et al., 2021). This development came due to an advance of technology. The most common parts that make up the drone that results in the integration of other public needs include propellers, extra batteries, carrying case, propeller guard, landing pad, global positioning system, and autonomous flight modes, among others (Zhao et al., 2022).

Drones were first used in July 1849, and Austrians used them as flying objects. It was a simple balloon that was deployed for military reasons. Even though this isn't a drone, it was the first step toward the creation of a novel technology (Basan et al., 2021). Since then, different developments started in Austria in 1849, Britain in 1915, Kettering but was advanced in 1916. In the years 1937 through 1941, the USA introduced the Radio plane OQ2 drone. In 1973, two surveillance drones were introduced and used, i.e., IAV Scout and Mastiff. During the years 1990 to 2014, there was a need to have micro-and miniature drones, the dangerous use of drones was witnessed in 1986 using RQ2. In 2016, due to the increased developments in internet-enabling technologies, different drones were developed to fit several domains of the public (Abdelmaboud, 2021). For 2019 and 2020, the concept widened to underwater craft (these developments are presented in Figure. 1). However, due to the coronavirus pandemic that was enormous between 2019 to 2021, limited developments have been started in 2021 to date.

Figure 1.

Drones generational development (1849 to 2020)

Drones have demonstrated diverse applications like aerial surveillance and photography, mapping and surveying, search and rescue, asset inspection, payload carrying, agriculture, crop spraying, bird control (summarized drones’ applications are presented in Figure 2), among others. These applications require constant communication, either between a central control station and the drones (in the case of cloud or edge computing) or between the drones themselves, for instance, Internet of Things (IoT) (devices that connect and share network resources). In all these applications, security and confidentiality are major concerns for the safety of communication.

In the cybersecurity public space perspective, the main purpose is to ensure an equilibrium between three distinct security concepts: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA triad). For confidentiality, a set of guidelines restricts who has access to vital data (Shokoor et al., 2022). The integrity checks out the ability to ensure that the data is not modified by an unauthorized party and the guarantee to provide customers with their required service at any time is known as availability.

Drone cyber security is a critical and current trend in the state-of-the-art industry due to the wide variety of drone applications. The drone has many advantages which allow it to achieve momentum instantly, such as: being agile, its ability to ñy, the capacity to access hard-to-reach areas that might be hazardous for humans or require altitude (Mostafavi & Shafik, 2019). The exponential growth in technology allows drones to be embedded with software, advanced sensors, and other gadgets and technologies that allow inter-devices communication, and connectivity to the internet. This magnifies the cyber security and privacy concerns of drone users, especially when it is used in the public domain. Determining adequate algorithms to deal with different security threats and attacks is needed to secure the CIA triad.