A Framework for Privacy-Compliant Delivery Drones

Abstract

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 a number of host airspaces, each of which may have different privacy requirements. Privaros provides a mandatory access control framework to enforce the policies of these hosts on the guest delivery drones. Privaros is tailored for ROS, a middleware popular in many drone platforms. This thesis presents the design and implementation of these mechanisms, describe show policies are specified, and shows that Privaros’s 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