Privaros: A Framework for Privacy-Compliant Delivery Drones

Rakesh Rajan Beck, Abhishek Vijeev, Vinod Ganapathy.

Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2020); pages 181--194; Virtual event (originally: Orlando, Florida, USA), November 9-13, 2020.

We present Privaros, a framework to enforce privacy policies on drones. Privaros is designed for commercial delivery drones, such as the ones that will likely be used by Amazon Prime Air. Such drones visit various host airspaces, each of which may have different privacy requirements. Privaros uses mandatory access control to enforce the policies of these hosts on guest delivery drones. Privaros is tailored for ROS, a middleware popular in many drone platforms. This paper presents the design and implementation of Privaros's policy-enforcement mechanisms, describes how policies are specified, and shows that policy specification can be integrated with India's Digital Sky portal. Our evaluation shows that a drone running Privaros can robustly enforce various privacy policies specified by hosts, and that its core mechanisms only marginally increase communication latency and power consumption.

Paper: [ PDF | HTML ] (© ACM)
Slides: [ PDF | YouTube ]
Poster: [ PDF | PNG ]
Code: [ GitHub ]
Arxiv: [ arXiv:2002.06512 ]
Patent: [ Indian Patent 426,359 ]
DOI: [ 10.1145/3372297.3417858 ]
Demo: [ YouTube ]
Media Coverage: [ ACM News, IISc Featured News, Times of India ]


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