Drones: Security advice for cities

Drones are used everywhere - for transportation purposes, emergency management to infrastructure protection. But the unmanned aerial vehicles also pose major security challenges, according to a recently published study, "Establishing a Safe and Secure Municipal Drone Program." From a cybersecurity perspective, potential disasters are bound to happen should one of several drone systems or the software that controls them be compromised or tampered with, according to Mohamad Amin Hasbini, a board member of Securing Smart Cities and senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.

For cities looking to implement and use a drone program, the study's authors provide appropriate security advice:

• Implementation of methodical safety procedures already in the development and manufacturing process;
• Identify integration points that can be used as attack vectors within a citywide drone system, including cloud-based software services;
• Establish standardized guidelines for attack detection, evidence collection, or establishing no-fly zones;
• Use of algorithms to support automated operations and collaboration between drones;
• in addition, due to possible authorization of drones under the widely used 'Beyond Line of Sight' (BLOS), operations and security engineers should already be planning how to protect cities from future threats by integrating a drone program into the national airspace.

The study was conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and the initiative Securing Smart City jointly created and demonstrates guidelines for creating and implementing safe (physically and software) urban drone programs.

Source: Kaspersky Lab