Methodology of secure target data transfer from aircraft in case of limited communication session time
Артем Валерійович Чирков, Пилип Олександрович Приставка · Ukrainian Scientific Journal of Information Security · 2018
One of the relevant problems in the area of unmanned aviation system developing for the reconnaissance purposes are problems related to the communication channel between aircraft and ground control station. In particular, for some specialized tasks (primarily military aerial reconnaissance or rescue operations) additional conditions are set, e.g. sessional channel usage instead of the continuos one or data traffic limitation. The mentioned conditions are caused by the tasks of information security and security of unmanned aviation system and its crew (pilot, operator of target payload, engineers and supervisor). But in practice in unmanned aviation and combat systems presented in Ukraine and other countries (at least the systems which aren't related to sensitive information in governmental and/or commercial sense) standard usage patterns usually take place, particularly patterns of data flow between aircraft and ground control station. These patterns are: transferring all video stream to ground control station for its online watching or on-board video recording followed by its offline watching after landing. The specified patterns have both advantages and disadvantages. This publication proposes the comparative analysis of the following methods of data transfer between aircraft and ground control station: direct video stream transfer ("as is"), scaled and/or individual frame transfer, transfer of target patches (video frame areas containing target information) as stream or as packets, radio silence mode (recorded video watching after aircraft landing); proposes the new data transfer methodology which takes into account the features of some classes of practical tasks, including the main requirements of information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity and data availability.