Privacy-Preserving Multi-Party Access Control for Third-Party UAV Services

Third-Party Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Services, a.k.a. Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS), are an increasingly adopted business model, which enables possibly unskilled users, with no background knowledge, to operate drones and run automated drone-based tasks. Although these services provide significant advantages, the resources provided by drones are typically owned by multiple parties. Thus, Third-Party UAV services require adopting multi-party access control solutions. In this context, the leakage of the access control policies specified by the data owners might disclose confidential information and, thus, they should be protected as well. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserving multi-party access control solution tailored to the application scenarios of Third-Party UAV Services. Our solution advances an existing privacy-preserving multi-party access control framework based on Secure Function Evaluation to fit the distributed and heterogeneous nature of drone deployments. Through an extensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate our solution can perform private policy evaluation on constrained devices in a reasonable time while requiring limited communication, memory, and energy overhead.