Improving Drone Mission Continuity in Rescue Operations with Secure and Efficient Task Migration

Abstract

Nowadays first responders are assisted in rescue operations by several modern technologies in the disposal of humanity such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, the success of the missions of the UAVs is affected by several factors such as their limited battery lifetime, security breaches, or faults. Thus, the concept of drone replacement has been introduced, which is the migration of a drone's data to another drone. However, most research works on drone replacement only focus on the battery management for the task migration, with a lack of consideration of the task migration from a security perspective. In this paper, we propose a secure system architecture based on isolation, which reduces the blast radius in case of attack prior to the migration, and enables security during migration. We also propose a method to migrate drone data preventing malicious attacks. In addition, we demonstrate the efficiency of the design by showing that the security overhead is not affected by the type of data.