ORION: Verification of drone trajectories via remote identification messages

With the widespread adoption of drones in daily life, next-generation smart cities need to establish highways, i.e., trajectories where drones can fly and operate safely. However, due to the untrusted nature of their ecosystem, drones might misbehave and take disallowed trajectories, e.g., to reduce the time to fly to a destination, reduce energy consumption, visit unauthorized areas, or disrupt operations of sensitive sites. In this paper, we address the cited problem by proposing ORION, a new framework for online drone trajectory verification. ORION requires one or more receivers distributed in a given area capable of receiving and analyzing standard Remote Identification (RID) messages emitted by operational drones. ORION compares the locations reported in such messages with the closest set of coordinates in the allowed trajectory. It raises an alarm if the distance between such locations exceeds a threshold calibrated offline. We validate the performance of ORION through data collected from both a real drone flight in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and taxi trajectories in Porto (Portugal), achieving a True Positive Ratio (correct detection of disallowed trajectories) up to 0.95 and a False Positive Ratio (incorrect detection of disallowed trajectories) up to 0.04. Our solution significantly outperforms existing approaches used for drone detection or time-series analysis. Finally, we also release the gathered data as open-source to foster future research.