# UAV IoT Framework Views and Challenges: Towards Protecting Drones as \"Things\"
## 1 Introduction  
The applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are diverse, including areas related to civilian, military, commercial, and governmental sectors [1; 2; 3; 4; 5]. Examples include environmental monitoring (e.g., pollution, health of plants, and industrial accidents) in the civilian sector. In military and governmental areas, we mainly have surveillance and delivery applications aiming to acquire or provide information at locations after a disaster or attack, and to distribute medicine or other essential items. Commercial applications are focused on delivering products and goods both in urban and rural areas. UAVs, since they are dependent on sensors, antennas, and embedded software, are considered as part of the Internet of Things, providing a two-way communication for applications related to remote control and monitoring [6]. The Internet of Things (IoT) constitutes a rapidly emerging cutting-edge environment in which the focal concept lies in the orchestration of a large variety of smart objects in such a way that they can be utilized and operated globally, either directly by users or by special software that captures their behavior and objectives. IoT enables objects to become active participants of everyday activities, with numerous promising applications through various communication technologies in the context of the \"smart-city\" vision [7]. It is estimated that around 25 billion uniquely identifiable objects are expectedto be part of this global community by 2020. These projections are expected to substantially increase with the introduction of 5G technologies and networks. IoT objects are becoming more complex, heterogeneous, and highly distributed [8]. This transformation comes with a cost: the IoT, as a fusion of heterogeneous networks, not only involves the same security problems with sensor networks, mobile communication networks, and the Internet, but also brings along specific privacy-protection challenges. As part of heterogeneous networks, things have to support advanced security concepts, such as authentication, access control, data protection, confidentiality, cyber-attack prevention, and a high level of authorization [9]. These security and privacy challenges are different from traditional Internet security issues, since the IoT presents unique features in handling and dealing with external and internal threats. In this context, a regulatory framework is needed for setting and applying rules and policies in commercial objects. This framework should provide regulation rules and procedures that all commercial things should pass for receiving a security and privacy license in terms of connectivity and intelligence, actuation, and control features. In light of the aforementioned remarks, this paper:  
* Overviews new UAV application domains enabled by IoT and 5G technologies. * Analyzes the IoT sensor requirements for drones. * Summarizes the privacy and security challenges of UAV applications. * Overviews solutions for fleet management over aerial networking. Furthermore, to address IoT security and privacy challenges for drones, an advanced framework for end-to-end security and privacy prevention in real, market-based dynamic IoT environments is introduced. The proposed framework includes cutting-edge holistic approaches for advancing the current security and privacy level into a robust, resilient, and high-protected trusted environment. The framework supports multilevel and multidomain defence mechanisms in protecting IoT objects (i.e., UAVs) from spoofing, signal-jamming, and physical attacks, RF and mobile-application hacking, protocol abusing, and firmware hacks/sabotage. Privacy preservation is accomplished by effective 'crowd of things' strategies, where the anonymity of the users and the information that the UAV carries are ensured. Vision techniques are considered as aiming to enhance the security of IoT by supporting computer-vision and machine-learning solutions.