Internet of Drones Security and Privacy Issues: Taxonomy and Open Challenges

Internet of Drones (IoD) is a decentralized network and management framework that links drones' access to the controlled airspace and provides inter-location navigation services. The interconnection of drones in the IoD network is through the Internet of Things (IoT). Hence the IoD network is vulnerable to all the security and privacy threats that affect IoT networks. It is highly required to safeguard a good atmosphere free from security and privacy threats to get the desired performance from IoD applications. Security and privacy issues have significantly restricted the overall influence of the IoD paradigm. There are existing survey studies that helped lay a vital foundation for understanding the IoD security and privacy issues. However, not all have thoroughly investigated the level of security and privacy threats associated with the various drone categories. Besides, most existing review studies do not examine secured IoD architecture. This paper aims to assess the recent trends in the security and privacy issues that affect the IoD network. We investigate the level of security and privacy threats of the various drone categories. We then highlight the need for secured IoD architecture and propose one. We also give a comprehensive taxonomy of the attacks on the IoD network. Moreover, we review the recent IoD attack mitigating techniques. We also provide the performance evaluation methods and the performance metrics employed by the techniques. Finally, we give research future direction to help researchers identify the latest opportunities in IoD research. © 2013 IEEE.