The pervasive capabilities and myriad of mission performance abilities of Unmanned (Combat) Aerial Vehicles (UAVs/UCAVs) have exponentially grown their deployment possibilities in the recent past. Advancements in artificial intelligence, sensing technologies and autonomous guidance, navigation and control capabilities have further fueled wide-scale deployments of UAVs, both for military and commercial applications, ranging from autonomous air taxis and cargo deliveries to intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance, and combat missions. Most of these applications consume Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) based location information for their services, which is also shared in real-time with ground control stations and centralized service operators, often using insecure communication channels. This limitation has significantly raised the location privacy concerns of aerial vehicles, deployed to conduct user-centric, safety-critical and localization-sensitive operations. A compromise of location privacy of a UAV can pose serious threats, including stalking, theft or damage of UAV/payload or even use of GNSS-guided munitions. These emerging threats call for robust and trust-worthy solutions for preserving the location privacy of aerial vehicles.

This paper proposes a novel obfuscation-based mechanism to safeguard location information against privacy attacks. Our proposed solution conceals actual information by transmitting modified location parameters, either after diluting their accuracy or by fabricating deceptive trajectories for a known eavesdropper. Based on these two broad categories, defined as Attenuation and Deception-based obfuscation techniques respectively, we also present a novel taxonomy of 3D obfuscation mechanisms, supported by formal descriptions of underlying operators. The operators can be used independently or in conjunction to satisfy diverse mission-specific obfuscation profiles. The proposed operators have been practically implemented and evaluated using a customizable obfuscator deployed over a Global Positioning System (GPS) guided UAV. The field experiments validate the efficacy, security and deployability of the proposed solution against location-privacy threats.

近来，无人（战斗）飞行器（UAV / UCAV）的无所不在的能力和无数的任务执行能力成倍地增加了其部署的可能性。人工智能，传感技术以及自主制导，导航和控制能力的进步进一步推动了无人机的广泛部署，无论是用于军事还是商业应用，从自动空中出租车和货物交付到情报监视，侦察和作战任务，无所不包。这些应用程序中的大多数都使用基于全球导航卫星系统（GNSS）的服务位置信息，这些信息也经常使用不安全的通信通道与地面控制站和集中式服务运营商实时共享。这种局限性极大地提高了飞行器的位置隐私问题，这种飞行器被部署用于执行以用户为中心，对安全至关重要且对位置敏感的操作。无人机位置隐私的妥协可能构成严重威胁，包括跟踪，盗窃或损坏无人机/有效载荷，甚至使用GNSS制导的弹药。这些新出现的威胁要求使用强大且值得信赖的解决方案来保护航空器的位置隐私。

本文提出了一种新颖的基于混淆的机制来保护位置信息免受隐私攻击。我们提出的解决方案通过传输修改后的位置参数来隐瞒实际信息，这些参数可能是在降低精度之后或为已知的窃听者制造了欺骗性的轨迹。基于这两大类，分别定义为基于衰减和欺骗的混淆技术，我们还提出了一种新颖的3D混淆机制分类法，并通过对底层算子的正式描述来支持。操作员可以独立使用，也可以结合使用，以满足各种特定于任务的混淆配置文件。使用部署在全球定位系统（GPS）引导的无人机上的可定制混淆器，已实际实施和评估了建议的操作员。