One of the challenges for civilian-military logistics systems is how to arrange the transfer of transport assets from the civilian operator to a military, and back. We are developing a dualuse, rural, drone transport system based on autonomous swarms that could also be used for frontline logistics. But how do we hand over the control of a drone in a cyber secure way? And then get it back to the civilian operator. All digital interfaces become potential attack surfaces enabling the entire system to be hijacked by an opponent, should the design fail.

This short paper presents no solution to this challenge. At best, we give a hint towards a solution. Our purpose is to describe the problem, put attention on this research topic, and broadcast a call for help. We plan a commercial deployment of the civilian system in 2027 and it would be useful to have a working hand-over solution by then. If not, we can instead offer the system as a prototyping platform for anybody interested in implementing and testing
solutions. The intended civilian operator is Bussgods i Norr AB, a century old, publicly owned logistics company covering the northern half of Sweden with their transport services. Bussgods has 29 logistics centres in the form of bus stations that will be complemented with drone ports.

The technical specifications of the civilian rural autonomous transport system are similar to what is needed for military frontline logistics in the sense that the drones operate over large distances, take reasonably heavy cargo (say in the order of 10 kgs), work in arctic winters, and are tolerant to bad connectivity. What needs to be added is resilience to electronically disturbed environments.

The presented work stems largely from NATO Exploratory Team SAS-ET-HFM-GD “UAVlogistics
using a grid of autonomous charging stations”.
Keywords: Frontline logistics, autonomous transport systems, UAV, UGV.