As drones increasingly populate U.S. skies for tasks ranging from package delivery to infrastructure inspection, the threat of cyberattacks looms large. A hijacked drone could suddenly stall, crash, or veer off course, rendering the expensive machine useless.
Now, researchers at Florida International University (FIU) have developed a critical countermeasure. Computer scientists at FIU’s Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences have unveiled SHIELD, a defensive system designed to detect and neutralize drone cyberattacks in real-time, crucially allowing the drone to complete its mission.
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“Without robust recovery mechanisms, a drone cannot complete its mission under attacks, because even if it is possible to detect the attacks, the mission often gets terminated as a fail-safe move,” said Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman, lead researcher and associate professor at FIU. “What’s important about our framework is that it helps the system recover, so the mission can be completed.”
The breakthrough comes as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposes expanding commercial drone use, raising urgent concerns about safety in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The research was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks.
Unlike traditional defenses that rely on easily manipulated sensors, SHIELD monitors the drone’s entire control system, detecting abnormalities in both sensors and hardware—where hackers often hide. A sudden battery surge or an overheating processor, for example, can signal an attack in progress.
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The system then uses machine learning to diagnose the type of assault, identifying unique attack signatures and responding with a tailored recovery protocol. In lab simulations, the FIU team’s approach identified attacks in an average of 0.21 seconds and restored normal flight in just 0.36 seconds.
Rahman’s research group will next focus on scaling up testing to prepare SHIELD for real-world deployment. With unmanned aircraft poised to reshape commerce, infrastructure monitoring, and disaster response, the researchers assert that securing them is paramount.
“Reliable and secure drones are the key to unlocking future advancements,” Rahman said. “It’s our hope this work can play a role in moving the industry forward.”
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