Abstract
Drone trust infrastructure answers two questions well: Remote ID and the IETF Drone Remote ID Protocol (DRIP) say who an aircraft is, and UTM, U-space and geo-awareness say whether a flight may take place. Neither decides whether a specific act — arming motors, entering a newly restricted volume, releasing a payload, switching on a camera over a protected area, transmitting on a band, or joining a coordinated manoeuvre — may take effect at the actuator now, under current airspace and revocation state. Authorisations are granted at take-off, while acts are executed continuously by mission computers and autonomy stacks that can be compromised, misled, coerced with validly signed commands or cut off from their authorities; observers can verify identity but not whether what they see was authorised before it happened. This paper describes an actuator-level execution-finality profile for civil drones and autonomous vehicles. Each consequential act stays non-effective until a protected enforcement domain on every command-to-enablement path verifies an act-bound, sink-bound handle against live trusted context, consumes current authority atomically, commits a receipt, and only then releases the physical enable line, latch power, amplifier enable or sensor rail; safe states are always available. For observers it adds Compact Broadcast Act Evidence: 16-octet per-act decision records authenticated with a TESLA-style delayed-disclosure key chain sealed in the enforcement domain and anchored to the aircraft's DRIP identity, fitting the 25-octet Broadcast Remote ID budget without a signature per act. It also covers compact proof capsules for small links, envelope handles for high-rate motor setpoints, a boundary-proximity revalidation bound, bounded offline operation, multi-aircraft composite acts, conflict-set-bound detect-and-avoid finality, emergency-scene temporary authority for road vehicles, and atomic control-authority handover; a reference harness passes 66 tests with zero dual-authority violations over 5,000 modelled handovers. Scope is strictly civil. This disclosure is based on the author's international patent applications PCT/IB2026/055615 (the "Mothership" application), filed on 4 June 2026 and publicly disclosed on 16 July 2026, and PCT/IB2026/053385 (the ALF application), filed on 7 April 2026 and publicly disclosed on 4 June 2026. The author is open to acquihire or strategic collaboration. IETF Datatracker: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-das-drip-uas-act-finality/ KEYWORDS drone security, UAS, unmanned aircraft, Remote ID, DRIP, ASTM F3411, UTM, U-space, geofencing, geo-awareness, detect and avoid, BVLOS, drone delivery, autonomous vehicles, ADAS, remote assistance, control handover, TESLA broadcast authentication, constrained devices, CBOR, COSE, RATS, fail-safe, cyber-physical security, execution finality
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Das, Sangam Kumar, "Cleared to Fly Is Not Cleared to Act: Actuator-Level Execution Finality and Compact Broadcast Act Evidence for Drones (UAS) and Autonomous Vehicles — With Implementation Variations and Industry Alignment", Technical Disclosure Commons, (November 05, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12799