Cyber-Certified Unmanned Traffic Management System for Safe Drone Integration

Last Updated: 27/09/2024 07:10     Created at: 27/09/2024 06:28

Final Presentation of NAVISP Project EL3-023 now available:

On Wednesday, September 25th, 2024, Unifly together with Nexova presented the results of the NAVISP EL3-023 project: “Secure Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM)”. 

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), such as drones, are becoming a major player in the aviation field. They have proven themselves as valuable assets to industry on missions such as deliveries, industrial inspections, law enforcement operations, mapping tasks and agricultural applications. However, the integration of these UAS into the current commercial airspace introduces new safety and security risks, particularly in the event of a successful cyberattack on the network or an individual aircraft. The objective was to analyze how to protect a UTM s/w platform to manage the UAS traffic against cyber-attacks, quantify the associated risks and mitigate them with effective countermeasures.  

The project started with a major stakeholder and regulatory analysis to quantify the existing UAS regulations on European level and identify potential cyber threats. This resulted in a set of relevant standards which the UTM should comply with. This phase was followed by the generation of a certification scheme which forms trusted and consistent security requirements the market should comply with. Having these requirements allowed the team to perform a gap analysis on the current UTM systems and identify where the largest improvements are to be made. 

The improvements were implemented into the UTM, followed by verification and validation tests on the Unifly platform. Jamming, spoofing, and simulated cyberattacks were performed on virtual UAS to assess the countermeasures of the UTM.  The team concluded that the new UTM is compliant with the majority of Security Assurance Requirements (SAR). Future development will focus on further security enhancement to eventually start real-world validation trials of the “Secure UTM”. 

The project was part of NAVISP Element 3, aiming to support national PNT strategies by providing support per country and possibly per domain for the development and promotion of products, applications and services based on PNT systems to foster national and international cooperation.

The slides are accessible here.