Security and Privacy Issues and Solutions for UAVs in B5G Networks: A Review

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in beyond 5G (B5G) are crucial for revolutionizing various industries, including surveillance, agriculture, and logistics, by enabling high-speed data transfer, ultra-low latency communication, and ultra-reliable connectivity. However, integrating UAVs into B5G networks poses various security and privacy concerns. These risks encompass the possibility of unauthorized access, breaches of data, and cyber-physical attacks which jeopardize the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of UAV operations. Moreover, UAVs in B5G networks are also at high risk from the application of machine learning (ML)-based attacks by exploiting vulnerabilities in ML models, leading to adversarial manipulation, data poisoning and model evasion techniques, which can compromise the integrity of UAV operations, lead to navigation errors, and expose sensitive data collected by UAVs. Considering the aforementioned security and privacy concerns, this review article presents emerging security and privacy solutions for UAVs in B5G networks. Firstly, We introduce the essential background of integrating UAVs into B5G networks and discuss the advantages and security challenges which the emerging integrated network architecture have. Then, we proceed to analyze and examine the security and privacy landscape by including threats and requirements of UAVs in B5G networks. Based on these threats and requirements, solutions from physical layer security (PLS), blockchain (BC), federated learning (FL) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) are discussed and explored in details. Moreover, potential future research directions are discussed in details as open research issues.