As the number of drones increases and the era in which they begin to fill the skies approaches, an important question needs to be answered: From a security and privacy perspective, are society and drones really prepared to handle the challenges that a large volume of flights will create? In this paper, we investigate security and privacy in the age of commercial drones. First, we focus on the research question: Are drones and their ecosystems protected against attacks performed by malicious entities? We list a drone’s targets, present a methodology for reviewing attack and countermeasure methods, perform a comprehensive review, analyze scientific gaps, present conclusions, and discuss future research directions. Then, we focus on the research question: Is society protected against attacks conducted using drones? We list targets within society, profile the adversaries, review threats, present a methodology for reviewing countermeasures, perform a comprehensive review, analyze scientific gaps, present conclusions, and discuss future research directions. Finally, we focus on the primary research question: From the security and privacy perspective, are society and drones prepared to take their relationship one step further? Our analysis reveals that the technological means required to protect drones and society from one another has not yet been developed, and there is a tradeoff between the security and privacy of drones and that of society. That is, the level of security and privacy cannot be optimized concurrently for both entities, because the security and privacy of drones cannot be optimized without decreasing the security and privacy of society, and vice versa.

Task computing ([R. Masuoka et al., (2003)]) enables a user to compose and execute complex tasks in application-, device- and service-rich environments. Task computing is possible through the availability of semantically described services that, can be composed on-the-fly by end-users into executable tasks. Through the use of a task computing client, users can not only compose tasks from available semantically described services, but discover, create, manage and manipulate services as well. The focus of this paper is the technologies used for dynamic service discovery, and creation, management and manipulation of semantically described services.

The Task Computing framework is designed to operate in dynamic ubiquitous environments in which a mobile computing user dynamically discovers the current set of available semantically defined services. Task Computing allows the end-user to easily and seamlessly integrate and manipulate services found on their own computer, the nearby devices and relevant remote web services. The user can create, execute and monitor complex tasks resulting from compositions of these services. In this paper, how Task Computing addresses some issues in mobile and ubiquitous multimedia applications and some of the multimedia related semantic services currently implemented in this framework are described.