David Kovar presented a talk on UAVs, IoT, and Cybersecurity at the LISA conference in Boston on December 7th, 2016.
The abstract for the talk was:
“Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) aka “drones” are all the rage—$500 UAVs are used in professional racing leagues and major corporations are building $100,000 UAVs to deliver packages and Internet connectivity. UAVs are slowly working their way into almost every commercial sector via operations, sales, manufacturing, or design.
sUAS—emphasis on the final “S”—are complex systems. The aerial platform alone often consists of a radio link, an autopilot, a photography sub-system, a GPS, and multiple other sensors. Each one of these components represents a cybersecurity risk unto itself and also when part of the larger system. Add in the ground control stations, the radio controller, and the video downlink system and you have a very complex computing environment running a variety of commercial, closed source, open source, and home brew software.
And yes, there is already malware specifically targeting drones.
During this presentation, we will walk through a typical operational workflow for a UAV, all of the components of a representative system, and through a possible risk assessment model for UAVs. Even if you are not working with UAVs, you should consider that UAVs are an instance of “the Internet of Things”—a collection of sensors and computing devices connected to each other and to the cloud designed to gather, distribute, and analyze data in a semi- or fully-autonomous manner.”
The slides may be found here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/conference-program/presentation/kovar