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 Unmanned vehicles with varying degree of autonomy will play increasingly important roles in NATO operations. Such vehicles and supporting systems have the potential to deliver substantial operational value across an array of missions.
While up until now, the focus has been on developing and demonstrating new functionalities, the closer these vehicles get to being deployed in real missions, the more urgent it becomes to secure them appropriately. And, in order to develop effective security measures, it is essential to understand the risks these vehicles may introduce or be subject to in future military missions. This requires an understanding of how they will be used in an operational setting and the technology on which they are built. Neither of these aspects has been properly defined yet. Not many operational mission concepts integrate the use of autonomous vehicles, and the vehicles themselves are still mostly just experimental prototypes. However, it is important to begin with identifying the most obvious risks and pressing security challenges as early as possible in order to integrate security already in the design phase of these vehicles.
This assumes an approach that allows for the concurrent assessment of the cyber, physical, autonomy and environmental risks characterizing the vehicles. Developing such approach and using it to produce a structured overview of the risks is one of the main goals of this Research Task Group (RTG). The other is to propose a reference model for security, either in the form of guidelines or an architecture, based on the identified risks and available scenarios.
On 19-21 November 2019, IST-164 held its 5th meeting at the US Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs, USA.
Published by IST | 
