The Need for Threat Modelling in Unmanned Aerial Systems

Detecting cybersecurity vulnerabilities in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) is essential to ensure the safe operation of drones. This supports the determination of cybersecurity objectives and the description of security requirements needed to achieve these objectives. However, it is challenging to automate this process to identify potential cyber threats and ensure the correctness of the applied security requirements, especially in a complex system such as a UAS network. In this work, we use ThreatGet as a threat modelling tool to identify potential cyber threats in UAS and highlight existing security vulnerabilities. This assists in determining the appropriate security requirements that could be implemented to achieve our security goal. We then develop a novel ontology-based threat modelling approach to infer a set of security threats based on the applied security requirements and then check the effectiveness of these requirements against threats to ensure these requirements are fulfilled.