Unifly, a Terra Drone Corporation group company and a leading provider of Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems, is proud to announce the successful completion of the groundbreaking Unified UTM Cybersecurity Model project, granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as part of the Broad Agency Announcement call 003. In partnership with the Rhea Group and NY UAS Test Site (NYUASTS), the objective and purpose of the project was to refine a UTM cybersecurity model, including the requirements and certification scheme, and to validate the model in an operational environment.
Andres Van Swalm, CEO at Unifly, expressed his satisfaction, ‘We are thrilled to have successfully led this R&D project in collaboration with FAA, Rhea, and FAA-designated UAS Test Site. As drone use continues to rise, it’s vital to develop specific cybersecurity measures for UTM to ensure airspace safety and security. We take pride in our key role in this initiative.'”
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With the rapid growth of the drone industry, ensuring the safety and security of our airspace is more important than ever. UTM systems have a big responsibility in this regard. The key characteristics of UTM systems – software-based, highly automated, and relatively recent – make them an attractive target for cyberattacks that exploit vulnerabilities, threatening aviation safety, the privacy of airspace users, and business operations. Although cybersecurity is unanimously recognized as a critical safety concern, UTM cybersecurity has only been partially explored to this date. This includes either considering a limited subset of security attributes (e.g., authentication) or applying generic cybersecurity frameworks (e.g., National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity framework) that do not provide sufficient cyber resilience for the complex ecosystem that is UTM.
As a result, no comprehensive approach to system requirements, and much less a unified certification scheme, has been developed to assess and validate cybersecurity for UTM systems. These gaps have triggered an urgent need for an updated security framework.
SOURCE: PRNewswire