Authors: Pietro Tedeschi, Savio Sciancalepore, Roberto Di Pietro

Date: December 15, 2020

 

PPCA — acronym for Privacy-Preserving Collision Avoidance — is a lightweight, distributed, and privacy-preserving protocol for automatically avoiding collisions among autonomous and semi-autonomous UAVs. PPCA is a lightweight and fully distributed solution, that integrates and adapts privacy-preserving proximity detection solutions conceived in the context of Online Social Networks, to work in a broadcast setting and to identify potentially colliding UAVs in a privacy-preserving fashion. Further, PPCA allows any couple of potentially colliding nearby drones to agree on a safe shared path, by releasing the temporary location of the drone only through a secure wireless connection. Moreover, PPCA does not rely on waypoints, does not need to compute the trajectory of other UAVs, and it allows to detect co-location throughout the whole path of the UAVs, not only in fixed waypoints.

All the details necessary to download, compile, and run the Partial Proof of Concept of PPCA protocol on your PC can be found here (to obtain the archive password, you can contact Pietro Tedeschi — ptedeschi at hbku dot edu dot qa — or Savio Sciancalepore — ssciancalepore at hbku dot edu dot qa).

Other details, such as the demo video and the source code of the formal security analysis of the PPCA protocol have been provided on the github repository.

For any questions, please refer to the following e-mail address: ptedeschi at hbku dot edu dot qa.

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first on GitHub to discuss what you would like to change.

Enjoy with the PPCA protocol!