Counteraction to the hidden destructive impact in swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles

The paper deals with the issue of information security in the unmanned aerial vehicles' swarm. In connection with the active development of this technology and its application in various spheres of human activity, one of the most important creation aspects of such a group is the destructive information impact countering of various kinds. The authors analyze the information interaction of swarm agents, dividing it into internal and external, based on the nature of the transmitted information messages. Describing the information interaction of the swarm, the authors develop a set-theoretic model that allows to determine the existing vulnerabilities. Based on the analysis of the identified vulnerabilities exposed to both destructive information interaction and hidden destructive information interaction, the authors propose an approach to countering destructive information impact on the basis of information security traditional methods – mobile cryptography, authentication methods, the model of police stations, improved for use in the context of decentralized systems. To detect violations of information semantic integrity, the authors propose an innovative method of countering the hidden destructive information interaction based on reputation mechanisms. Due to evaluative characteristics of all agents of the group, in the form of reputation criterion, the method allows to identify intruders who carry out not only intentional but also unintentional hidden destructive impact. In the view of information security, the method reduces the probability of the first and second kind errors. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approaches, an experiment is carried out, showing the effectiveness of the methods used in terms of errors of the I and II kind.