This year's Prof Kooy Prize was awarded to ir Eva Wisse for her thesis report focusing on cybersecurity and privacy issues for drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles)
Eva received the award during the Kooy Symposium on 12 April this year.
The Defence & Security Department of KIVI annually awards a prize for the best graduation thesis in a technology relevant to Defence and Security (hbo or tu). The prize, which is traditionally awarded during the Kooy Symposium, amounts to 2,000 euros in addition to eternal fame. This year, it was again a tough job for the jury to choose the best from eight entries.
Eva Wisse graduated from TU Eindhoven at the Faculty of Mathematics & Computer Science in the field of Information Security Technology (IST). She was supervised here by Dr Savio Sciancalepore from TU/e's Faculty of Mathematics & Computer Science. He was also the one who sent her an email after her graduation saying that he had submitted the thesis. Eva Wisse: "Because I never expected to stand a chance, I had actually already forgotten about it. Until I was called and invited to receive this prize during the Kooy Symposium."
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles research
Eva researched cybersecurity and privacy issues for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, also known as drones, which are increasingly gaining momentum in various Defence and Security applications. Within this context, Eva focused on the application of the RemoteID rule, a regulation that requires all commercial drones to wirelessly transmit messages with clear information about identity and location of the drone and driver among other information.
In the early stages of her thesis project, Eva identified one of the main threats related to enforcement of the RemoteID rule, namely the uncontrolled disclosure of the drone's identity to potentially malicious actors. Combined with the location in RemoteID messages, such identity could allow such actors to infer private data, such as the drone operator's home and the location of delivery companies' storage locations, to name a few.
Addressing such a threat is not easy, as we need to not only protect the identity of drones, but at the same time enable authorities to determine whether a drone is breaking the rules, for example by flying in a no-fly zone. Authorities must have the ability to identify drone misconduct and enforce protocols, even when the messages broadcast are anonymous.
To address such security threats, Eva considered protocols for anonymous group signatures, or protocols that allow the specific sender of a message to be hidden within a group, but where a group administrator is the only one able to reveal the sender's identity. Such protocols have been adopted in other contexts, such as online e-voting, but never for devices such as drones, which may be very limited in terms of processing capabilities and power availability.
High interest drone research
Based on this research, Eva wrote a paper, "A2RID - Anonymous Direct Authentication and Remote Identification of Commercial Drones", which was submitted to the IEEE Internet of Things Journal in early 2023. After graduation, Eva joined the Royal Air Force. She is currently attending the short officer training course at the KMA in Breda. There has been a great interest in research on drones at the Ministry of Defence in recent years. "At the moment, I am not involved in any follow-up research myself. However, I do regularly check for new developments in the field of RemoteID."
Photo: Jan Wind, chairman of KIVI's Defence and Security Department, Eva Wisse and Bart Koene, chairman of the jury.
