BLADE-CUAS Governance Node

Research Mission

BLADE-CUAS is a research effort to answer a question the commercial Counter-UAS market has left open: when multiple agencies share authority over the same airspace, who decides, on what evidence, and how is that decision proven afterward? The mission of this work is to specify a passive, hardware-enforced authority-governance layer that sits between existing detection sensors and the human operators authorized to act, so that every classification and every authority handoff is deliberate, auditable, and court-admissible.

Problem

Executive Order 14305 and the FY26 NDAA Title LXXXVI Safer Skies Act created a multi-agency C-UAS authority structure (federal departments coordinating with state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement) but no commercial system encodes who holds authority at which geofence, what evidence chain is required before mitigation, or how federal-SLTT handoff is performed when an incident crosses jurisdiction.

Gap

Commercial C-UAS hardware is mature for detection, identification, and mitigation. None of it provides the authority arbitration layer the post-EO 14305 environment now requires: no federal-SLTT arbitration, no verifiable multi-modal consensus gate, no court-admissible evidence chain, no ROE-aware deliberation window, and no Remote ID spoofing-detection layer.

Contribution

BLADE-CUAS extends the AUTHREX governance pipeline (validated on five operational BLADE platforms) into the C-UAS domain as the sixth BLADE platform. It contributes a four-tier HMAA model with federal-SLTT handoff, MAIVA Dempster-Shafer consensus across five passive sensor modalities, an ECDSA P-256 court-admissible evidence chain aligned with Fed. R. Evid. 901/902/803(6), an ROE-aware FLAME deliberation window, and ADARA-extended Remote ID spoofing detection. The platform reuses approximately 75% of the BLADE-EDGE governance core.

What the C-UAS Market Does Not Provide

The commercial Counter-UAS market is well populated with detection, identification, and mitigation hardware: radars, RF spectrum analyzers, EO/IR turrets, and an emerging class of kinetic and non-kinetic interceptors. None of these platforms address the authority arbitration layer that the post-EO 14305 regulatory environment now requires.

Five Documented Authority Gaps

• No federal-SLTT authority arbitration. Existing C-UAS systems are built for single-agency operation. The multi-agency authority structure authorized by EO 14305 (DHS, DOJ, military, and SLTT law enforcement operating in coordinated airspace) has no commercial governance reference architecture.
• No multi-modal consensus gate. Sensor fusion in commercial C-UAS is typically vendor-internal and proprietary. A platform-independent, verifiable consensus across radar, RF, EO/IR, and Remote ID with provenance weighting is not currently available.
• No court-admissible evidence chain. Audit logs in current C-UAS systems are vendor-formatted and not designed to satisfy the foundation requirements of Fed. R. Evid. 901, 902, and 803(6).
• No ROE-aware engagement window. Current systems present operators with binary engage/no-engage decisions without a structured deliberation window that contracts under threat density and expands under classification ambiguity.
• No Remote ID spoofing detection layer. The FAA Remote ID rule (14 CFR Part 89) is widely treated as authoritative provenance, but consumer-grade Remote ID spoofing is documented in the open literature. No commercial C-UAS product treats RID as one provenance signal among many, weighted against RF spectrum and radar.

BLADE-CUAS addresses all five gaps as a passive governance layer that integrates with existing detection hardware via standard interfaces (Ethernet, MAVLink, ASTM F3411 Remote ID). It does not replace radars, RF analyzers, EO/IR turrets, or mitigation effectors. It mediates the authority decisions that surround them.

Three Active Federal Anchors

Executive Order 14305 - Restoring American Airspace Sovereignty

EO 14305, signed 6 June 2025, expanded the C-UAS authority framework. The order directs federal departments to coordinate on regulations governing detection, tracking, and mitigation of unauthorized UAS, and authorizes participation by state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) law enforcement agencies under conditions to be specified by implementing regulations. The order frames C-UAS as a shared-authority problem that no single agency can solve alone. The coordinated-regulation requirement creates explicit demand for a governance reference architecture that encodes who has authority at which geofence, what evidence chain is required before mitigation, and how federal-SLTT handoff is performed when an incident crosses jurisdiction.

FY26 NDAA Title LXXXVI - Safer Skies Act (P.L. 119-60)

Signed 18 December 2025, the Safer Skies Act restructured the Joint Counter-Small UAS Office under section 912 into a task force with broader mitigation authorities and codified evidence-chain standards for C-UAS operations. The Act treats C-UAS evidence chains as a national-security concern: incidents that result in prosecution, civil enforcement, or international notification require a foundation of authenticated, tamper-evident records.

FEMA Counter-UAS Grant Program (P.L. 119-21 section 90005(a))

The FY26 Notice of Funding Opportunity is active with $500M authorized. Eligible recipients are SLTT agencies. Documented operational drivers include the FIFA World Cup 2026 (16 U.S. host cities), the America 250 celebrations (4 July 2026), and Super Bowl LX (Levi's Stadium, February 2026). The grant program creates immediate procurement demand for C-UAS systems whose authority models are compatible with SLTT operation and federal coordination.

National Importance

Unauthorized drone activity over airports, critical infrastructure, military installations, and mass-gathering events has moved from anomaly to routine. The detection problem is largely solved: radars, RF analyzers, EO/IR turrets, and Remote ID receivers are commercially mature. The unsolved problem is authority: across overlapping federal and state, local, tribal, and territorial jurisdictions, who is permitted to act on a given track, on what evidence, and how is that decision proven afterward.

2026 concentrates this challenge. A dense calendar of high-profile events - the FIFA World Cup across sixteen U.S. host cities, the America 250 celebrations, and Super Bowl LX - places large protected airspaces under shared federal-SLTT authority within a compressed window. Each event multiplies the number of agencies operating in the same airspace and the number of authority handoffs that must be performed correctly and on the record.

An authority-governance layer is what makes multi-agency Counter-UAS lawful, accountable, and defensible after the fact. Without it, coordinated operations rely on ad-hoc deconfliction and vendor-formatted logs that were never designed to satisfy an evidentiary standard. BLADE-CUAS is a research contribution toward closing that gap; it makes no empirical claims about specific incidents, operations, or named officials.

Cross-Domain Pipeline Portability

The BLADE-CUAS governance pipeline is architecturally the same pipeline specified for the BLADE-EDGE defense variant (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19177472), with approximately 75% of the governance core reused unchanged. This cross-domain portability demonstrates that authority-governed autonomy - continuous sensor-trust fusion, graded authority with hysteresis, deliberation windows, and a cryptographic evidence chain - is a domain-agnostic principle rather than a domain-specific one. The C-UAS-specific work is the federal-SLTT tier extension, the multi-modal consensus weighting, the Remote ID spoofing-detection layer, and the court-admissible evidence design.

Nine-Stage AUTHREX Pipeline, C-UAS Instantiation

BLADE-CUAS instantiates the full AUTHREX governance pipeline with C-UAS-specific roles for each stage. The pipeline runs once per detected track, with the FLAME stage opening a tier-dependent deliberation window before any mitigation authority is released.

Stage Definitions

Federal-SLTT Tier Structure

BLADE-CUAS uses the four-tier HMAA authority model consistent with the AUTHREX reference architecture, with role bindings specific to the EO 14305 authority structure. Each tier prescribes the minimum operator credential required to release the next downstream action, and the minimum evidence chain that must be present in the audit ledger.

Geofence policy binding. Each operational geofence has a policy file specifying the default tier and the federal-SLTT handoff rules. Policy files are signed and versioned; the active policy version is recorded in every audit entry.

Reference Sensor Integration

BLADE-CUAS is passive: it consumes data from upstream detection sensors and does not transmit. The reference design integrates five sensor modalities through standard interfaces. Vendors named below are reference targets; the integration is interface-defined, not vendor-defined.

Modality weights are reference defaults adjustable per geofence policy. MAIVA requires a minimum of three modalities to release a non-T3 classification; if fewer than three sensors report above their SATA trust threshold, the system holds at T3 and emits a degraded-input audit entry.

Court-Admissible Audit Design

The Federal Rules of Evidence, specifically the foundation requirements of Rules 901 (authentication and identification), 902 (self-authentication), and 803(6) (records of a regularly conducted activity), establish what an audit chain must demonstrate to be admissible. BLADE-CUAS is designed to satisfy these foundation requirements; final admissibility is a judicial determination, not a system property.

Per-Input Signing

Every sensor input is signed with an ECDSA P-256 signature at acquisition time, using a hardware key resident in the TPM 2.0 secure element. The signed payload includes sensor identity, acquisition timestamp (UTC via PTP), sensor health byte, and raw measurement bytes. The signature establishes the foundation for Rule 901 authentication.

Hash-Chained Audit Ledger

Every audit entry references the cryptographic hash of the previous entry (prev_hash), forming a tamper-evident chain. The ledger is written to persistent storage with append-only semantics and a periodic external anchor (signed hash exported to a separate air-gapped store).

Decision Provenance

Each classification decision records the input vector, the trust vector across sensors, the alternative classifications considered by MAIVA, the active authority tier at decision time, the operator (if any) who acted, the FLAME window boundaries, the ERAM score, and the final outcome. This decision record supports Rule 803(6).

Defense-in-Depth Security

BLADE-CUAS uses a three-layer security architecture anchored in hardware. Because the node is passive and advisory, the security model protects the integrity of the authority computation and the evidence chain rather than gating a physical effector.

Transportable Governance Node - Reference Design

Form Factor and Deployment

BLADE-CUAS is designed for roll-on / roll-off deployment at stadium perimeters, motorcade staging areas, critical infrastructure access points, and federal coordination centers. The reference enclosure is a MIL-STD-810G transportable case with a NEMA 4X external rating. It accepts 12 V or 24 V vehicle bus power and includes a four-hour LiFePO4 battery backup for setup and teardown periods.

Compute and Cryptographic Subsystems

Power and Thermal

Typical power draw 250 W; peak 400 W. Active cooling combines forced-air with a Peltier-augmented heat exchanger rated for 50 degrees C ambient. The LiFePO4 280 Wh battery is hot-swappable for continuous operations. Power conditioning accepts MIL-STD-1275 vehicle bus, civilian 12 V automotive, and 110 / 220 VAC via an external converter.

Standards Alignment

• RTCA DO-365 - Counter-UAS detection, track, and identification standard.
• MIL-STD-461G - Electromagnetic interference and emissions.
• FCC Part 15 - RF emissions for passive sensing (the SDR receives only).
• DoDD 3000.09 - Authority tier model mapped to HMAA T3/T2/T1/T0.

Power & Thermal Architecture

BLADE-CUAS is built for roll-on / roll-off field deployment, so the power and thermal design prioritizes multi-source input and uninterrupted operation through setup and teardown.

Advisory-Only by Design - No Effector Interlock

Unlike the other BLADE platforms, BLADE-CUAS has no actuator, no effector, and no safety relay. It does not detect, track, jam, spoof, or mitigate any aircraft. It is a passive governance layer: it consumes data from upstream detection sensors, computes an authority tier, a classification, and a cryptographically signed evidence record, and presents these to authorized human and federal-SLTT decision-makers. The decision to act, and any mitigation, remains entirely with authorized operators.

System Schematic

Full subsystem node graph color-coded by type (MCU, Sensor, Actuator, Power, Module, Display). Shows the Kria K26 governance plane and Jetson AGX Orin fusion plane, the five passive sensor modalities (radar, RF SDR, EO/IR, ADS-B/Remote ID, LIDAR), the TPM 2.0 and secure-element cryptographic subsystems, power conditioning (Vicor DC-DC, 280 Wh LiFePO4, MIL-STD-1275 SiC TVS), thermal management, and the MIL-DTL-38999 external connector set (J1-J12) with data and power links.

Reference Configuration Cost

The reference bill of materials targets approximately $43.5K for a typical configuration, with a range of $35K-$55K depending on sensor selection and redundancy. The figure is a design estimate for the reference architecture, not a quoted or built price.

Sensor cost dominates the BOM. The governance node itself (compute + crypto + integration) is approximately $7K; the remainder is the reference sensor suite, which a deploying agency may already own. BLADE-CUAS is interface-defined, so existing detection hardware can be reused.

Physical Specifications

Browser-Based Six-Scenario Simulator

The BLADE-CUAS Governance Simulator runs the full nine-stage pipeline over six scripted operational scenarios plus a free-play mode, entirely in the browser with no backend. It is fully deterministic for a given seed: a re-run reproduces an identical decision trace and audit hash chain. Across a 300-run Monte Carlo batch (six scenarios, fifty runs each) the simulator records zero false tier elevations and zero false authority releases.

Validation Metrics

C-UAS Governance Scenarios

Each reference scenario exercises a distinct authority-arbitration path through the nine-stage pipeline. Runs are deterministic for a given seed (xoshiro128** PRNG): fifty runs per scenario form the 300-run Monte Carlo batch, and every run reproduces a bit-exact decision trace and SHA-256 audit hash chain. The measured outcomes are tier-assignment correctness, false tier-elevation rate, and false authority-release rate.

Across the 300-run batch the pipeline produced zero false tier elevations and zero false authority releases. These are simulation results for a reference design; no hardware has been fabricated and no live track data has been used.

Role in the Governance Stack

BLADE-CUAS is the sixth instantiation of the AUTHREX authority-governance framework, extending the same governance pipeline already specified across the BLADE family into the Counter-UAS domain. The seven governance architectures (SATA, HMAA, ADARA, MAIVA, FLAME, CARA, ERAM) are reused in their C-UAS-specific roles, demonstrating that the framework is domain-portable rather than domain-specific. BLADE-CUAS reuses approximately 75% of the BLADE-EDGE governance core; the C-UAS-specific work is the federal-SLTT tier extension, the multi-modal consensus weighting, the Remote ID spoofing-detection layer, and the court-admissible evidence chain.

SDK Integration

The BLADE Governance SDK provides a unified API across all seven BLADE domains. The same blade_governance library drives defense weapons governance (BLADE-EDGE), autonomous-vehicle authority (BLADE-AV), maritime surveillance (BLADE-MARITIME), critical-infrastructure protection (BLADE-INFRA), orbital autonomy (BLADE-SPACE), and counter-UAS authority (BLADE-CUAS). Only the domain configuration file changes; for BLADE-CUAS the effector is null because the node is advisory-only.

domain: counter_uas
pipeline: SENSE -> SATA -> ADARA -> IFF -> HMAA -> MAIVA -> FLAME -> ERAM -> CARA

sensors:
  - id: radar
    type: echodyne_echoguard
    weight: 0.30
  - id: rf_spectrum
    type: ettus_b205mini_sdr
    weight: 0.25
  - id: eo_ir
    type: flir_boson_640
    weight: 0.20
  - id: remote_id
    type: uavionix_pingrx_pro
    weight: 0.15
  - id: lidar
    type: livox_hap
    weight: 0.10

effector:
  type: null            # advisory-only, no effector
  mode: passive_advisory

authority:
  tiers: [T3, T2, T1, T0]   # federal-SLTT handoff
  min_modalities_for_release: 3
  evidence: ecdsa_p256_hash_chain
  fre_foundation: [901, 902, 803_6]

import blade_governance as bg

# Initialize with counter-UAS domain config
pipeline = bg.GovernancePipeline("blade_cuas.yaml")

# In the sensor-fusion loop:
while node_active:
    tracks = get_sensor_tracks()

    result = pipeline.evaluate(tracks)
    # result.trust       -> 0.71
    # result.authority   -> "T2"
    # result.deception_p -> 0.34 (RID spoof)
    # result.execute     -> False (advisory only)

    publish_to_operators(result)
    pipeline.append_audit(result)   # ECDSA P-256

Companion Paper & Documentation

The BLADE-CUAS companion paper and the complete reference documentation (build guide, configuration, electrical and mechanical maps, parts list, and system schematic) are deposited on Zenodo under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20299604 (CC BY 4.0). The full file set is browsable in the repository.

Technology Readiness

BLADE-CUAS is at TRL 2-3 for hardware (Preliminary Design Phase) and TRL 3-4 for the reference simulation (analytical and experimental proof-of-concept in a browser-native environment). All performance figures on this page are design targets for the reference simulation. Hardware build, empirical sensor calibration, and field measurement are post-petition deliverables.

Future Work

Repository & Reproducible Artifacts

BLADE-CUAS provides complete reproducible artifacts enabling independent verification of the governance pipeline behavior, the reference hardware design, and the simulator. All files are published open-access on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20299604) and mirrored in the repository.

Reference Artifacts

Complete BLADE-CUAS Governance Node reference package. All files are original work by Burak Oktenli (Georgetown University, M.P.S. Applied Intelligence), published under CC BY 4.0 on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20299604).

About This Project

The BLADE-CUAS Governance Node is part of the authority-governed autonomy research program by Burak Oktenli at Georgetown University (M.P.S. Applied Intelligence). It is the sixth domain instantiation of the BLADE governance pipeline, demonstrating that the same architectures developed across defense (BLADE-EDGE), automotive (BLADE-AV), maritime (BLADE-MARITIME), critical infrastructure (BLADE-INFRA), and orbital (BLADE-SPACE) reference designs apply to counter-UAS authority governance under EO 14305 and the FY26 NDAA Safer Skies Act.

Related architectures: SATA · HMAA · CARA · MAIVA · FLAME · ADARA · ERAM

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Citation

If you reference BLADE-CUAS in scholarly or policy work, please cite as follows.