Automated Identification and Evaluation of Threat Scenarios for U-Space Solutions

The economic and social implications of the expanding drone ecosystem push the need to extend the Air Traffic Management to implement the Unmanned aircraft system Traffic Management. U-space, an European initiative launched in 2016, aims to design and implement a European system for managing and integrating drones in the airspace, as well as a set of services and procedures to guarantee airspace access for a large number of drones. However, the entry of new airspace users and operations brings new concerns, and the increasing risks of cyberattacks are a major factor in the U-space concerns. Indeed, standalone drones inherently introduce new cyber threats that are similar to the ones carried over by autonomous vehicles. Furthermore, U-space involves many highly-exposed Cyber-Physical Systems, with growing vulnerabilities potentially conducting to several threat scenarios and to security incidents affecting public spaces, critical facilities, as well as the citizen’s right to privacy. These considerations lead to the necessity to establish U-space security as a primary challenge and to introduce proper security-by-design approaches. From a research perspective, these result in the adoption of automated security risk assessment for addressing the U-space complexity and for increasing the cost-efficiency of engineering secure U-space systems. Following this direction, this work proposes a preliminary definition of a methodology for the automated security risk assessment of U-space solutions, employing the SESAR Security Risk Assessment Methodology (SecRAM) as a baseline. As a first step, a model-based methodology is investigated for a semi-automatic impact assessment of attacks on U-space assets. Our main contributions are represented by the: definition of criteria to automatically determine and evaluate threat scenarios for U-space solutions; the definition of a U-space Threat Scenario Catalogue, for supporting the automated assessment. Some results are presented for a case study about drone-based pharmaceutical delivery in U-space environment.