Escorting the Confidentiality and Integrity of UAVs: What Exactly Can Trusted Execution Environment Offer?

A UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), also commonly known as a drone, has a wide range of application scenarios and cutting-edge capabilities. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated software and hardware, algorithm, and system integration design, the comparatively tiny vehicle can now fully exploit its advantages in almost every field, which will continue to mature. Nonetheless, UAVs have revealed their particular vulnerability under the threat of sundry hostile attacks, which threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the system. To protect the confidentiality and integrity of UAVs, some researchers have found that Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is a potential solution, which provides an independent processing environment for secure storage and computing. As the practice of fitting UAVs with TEE grows in popularity, legislation is beginning to acknowledge their capabilities and offer them special licenses. Some well-known companies, such as Dajiang Innovation and Qualcomm, have also adopted TEE on their UAV products to enhance security. In order to figure out what meaningful role TEE can play in this scenario, we conduct several investigations and attempt to draw inspiration from them. We first go over the most recent reviews of UAV security and privacy issues, so as to examine the confidentiality and integrity requirements. Then, we review the existing works for UAV confidentiality and integrity protection integrated with TEE in detail and further propose a taxonomy. We also examine the benefits, security issues, and prospects of TEE. After conducting a gap analysis, we offer some recommendations for potential future courses of action.