Towards a Modular Attestation Framework for Flexible Data Protection for Drone Systems

Data protection is a rising concern for systems of drones to guarantee data integrity and privacy through the detection of drone violations in no-fly zones (NFZ). Despite their security guarantees, existing attestation frameworks present limited extensibility. This paper presents a modular attestation framework for drone systems overcoming such a barrier. The framework provides a high degree of flexibility to guarantee both data integrity within and across drones. We also propose a dedicated token-based attestation protocol to support NFZ violation detection. We implemented a proof-of-concept prototype using the OP-TEE and PX4 open environments for trusted execution and drone simulation. Evaluations show the framework guarantees strong data protection with a high level of flexibility while preserving performance and scalability.