Fly-ABAC: Attribute Based Access Control for the Navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

With the increasing deployment of UAVs across more and more domains such as surveillance, agriculture monitoring, and commercial delivery, there is an increasing need for robust systems that respect both federal regulations and private property owners’ constraints. To address these concerns, this paper presents a novel application of Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) for the navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to ensure compliance with both federal and public property owner preferences. Our research demonstrates that an ABAC system we call Fly-ABAC can effectively manage complex property restrictions by modeling positive and negative attributes as well as exclusion zones. Through simulations, our system has shown the ability to generate paths that avoid unauthorized zones and comply with specified access requirements, ensuring a high level of precision and customization in property access control.By leveraging the granularity of ABAC, Fly-ABAC can accommodate diverse property preferences and is easy to adjust to different scenarios, making it suitable for a wide range of applications, including enforcing regulations for flying over government buildings, airports, emergency operations, and private properties. Our findings indicate that this system not only enhances security and compliance but also provides property owners with a powerful tool to enforce their access policies. The implications of this research extend to improving the safety and operational efficiency of UAVs in complex environments, paving the way for the broader adoption of UAV for both commercial and private uses.