Obfuscated Location Disclosure for Remote ID Enabled Drones

2024-07-19

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

AI Summary

Remote ID (RID) mandates broadcast of real-time drone locations, raising serious privacy leakage and adversarial tracking risks. To address this, we propose OLO-RID—a novel scheme that, for the first time, integrates differential privacy–based location perturbation with dual-mode disclosure into the standard RID framework: it broadcasts ε-differentially private obfuscated coordinates to the public while embedding AES-256–encrypted true coordinates for authorized entities (e.g., regulators or emergency responders). Fully compliant with existing RID protocols, OLO-RID is implemented on a Raspberry Pi 3 for lightweight, real-time message generation (<0.16 s per broadcast) and incurs only a 0.0236% energy overhead on DJI Mini 2 drones. Evaluated across three representative operational scenarios, it achieves bounded location utility loss and demonstrates superior privacy–utility trade-offs compared to baseline approaches.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Privacy-enhancing technologies
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems

Abstract

The Remote ID (RID) regulation recently introduced by several aviation authorities worldwide (including the US and EU) forces commercial drones to regularly (max. every second) broadcast plaintext messages on the wireless channel, providing information about the drone identifier and current location, among others. Although these regulations increase the accountability of drone operations and improve traffic management, they allow malicious users to track drones via the disclosed information, possibly leading to drone capture and severe privacy leaks. In this paper, we propose Obfuscated Location disclOsure for RID-enabled drones (OLO-RID), a solution modifying and extending the RID regulation while preserving drones'location privacy. Rather than disclosing the actual drone's location, drones equipped with OLO-RID disclose a differentially private obfuscated location in a mobile scenario. OLO-RID also extends RID messages with encrypted location information, accessible only by authorized entities and valuable to obtain the current drone's location in safety-critical use cases. We design, implement, and deploy OLO-RID on a Raspberry Pi 3 and release the code of our implementation as open-source. We also perform an extensive performance assessment of the runtime overhead of our solution in terms of processing, communication, memory, and energy consumption. We show that OLO-RID can generate RID messages on a constrained device in less than 0.16 s while also requiring a minimal energy toll on a relevant device (0.0236% of energy for a DJI Mini 2). We also evaluate the utility of the proposed approach in the context of three reference use cases involving the drones'location usage, demonstrating minimal performance degradation when trading off location privacy and utility for next-generation RID-compliant drone ecosystems.

Problem

• Remote ID regulations expose drone location data enabling malicious tracking
• Plaintext broadcasts compromise drone privacy leading to potential capture risks
• Current RID systems lack privacy protection while requiring location disclosure

Innovation

• Uses differential privacy for location obfuscation
• Extends messages with encrypted location data
• Deploys efficiently on constrained devices like Raspberry Pi