Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are aircraft without a human pilot on board. They are comprised of a ground-based autonomous or human operated control system, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a communication, command and control (C3) link between the two systems. UAS are widely used in military warfare, wildfire mapping, aerial photography, etc primarily to collect and process large amounts of data. While they are highly efficient in data collection and processing, they are susceptible to software espionage and data manipulation. This research aims to provide a novel solution to enhance the security of the flight controller thereby contributing to a secure and robust UAS. The proposed solution begins by introducing a new technology in the domain of flight controllers and how it can be leveraged to overcome the limitations of current flight controllers.
The idea is to decouple the applications running on the flight controller from the task of data validation. The authenticity of all external data processed by the flight controller can be checked without any additional overheads on the flight controller, allowing it to focus on more important tasks. To achieve this, we introduce an adjacent controller whose sole purpose is to verify the integrity of the sensor data. The controller is designed using minimal resources from the reconfigurable logic of an FPGA. The secondary I/O processor is implemented on an incipient Zynq SoC based flight controller. The soft-core microprocessor running on the configurable logic of the FPGA serves as a first level check on the sensor data coming into the flight controller thereby forming a trusted boundary layer. / Master of Science / UAV is an aerial vehicle which does not carry a human operator, uses aerodynamic forces to lift the vehicle and is controlled either autonomously by an onboard computer or remotely controlled by a pilot on ground. The software application running on the onboard computer is known as flight controller. It is responsible for guidance and trajectory tracking capabilities of the aircraft.
A UAV consists of various sensors to measure parameters such as orientation, acceleration, air speed, altitude, etc. A sensor is a device that detects or measures a physical property. The flight controller continuously monitors the sensor values to guide the UAV along a specific trajectory.
Successful maneuvering of a UAV depends entirely on the data from sensors, thus making it vulnerable to sensor data attacks using fabricated physical stimuli. These kind of attacks can trigger an undesired response or mask the occurrence of actual events. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach where we perform a first-level check on the incoming sensor data using a dedicated low cost hardware designed to protect data integrity. The data is then forwarded to the flight controller for further access and processing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/82666 |
| Date | 26 March 2018 |
| Creators | Kini, Akshatha Jagannath |
| Contributors | Electrical and Computer Engineering, Patterson, Cameron D., Abbott, A. Lynn, Plassmann, Paul E. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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