DroneTrace Partners with Marshall University
Marshall University's Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) is building out a drone forensics and security research program with DroneTrace, and its executive director says the goal is to make Marshall the flagship university for a field that barely exists yet.
ICS and DroneTrace announced the partnership in 2025. It expanded that October, when DroneTrace donated a series of specialized research unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to the university. ICS Executive Director Alexandria Donathan told WV News the aircraft will anchor research in three areas: drone forensics, counter-UAS technology, and secure-by-design autonomous systems.
The forensics gap is the starting point. Only a handful of drone forensics labs exist in the United States today, and pulling usable intelligence from a captured drone can take four to six months, often too late to matter for a national security response. Marshall and DroneTrace are working to cut that down to minutes, in the field. "It's about getting actionable intelligence instead of just destroying the drones," Donathan said.
Counter-UAS research at ICS treats a drone as a cyber-physical system: a flying computer that can be attacked, and defended, the same way any computer can. Secure-by-design work applies that thinking earlier, building cybersecurity into autonomous systems from the start instead of adding it after the fact.
The stakes go beyond the lab. Donathan pointed to the Ukraine conflict as the moment this gap became impossible to ignore: forces without a fast way to exploit a downed drone were left with a choice between destroying it or learning nothing from it. Getting that intelligence to operators while they're still in theater is what keeps troops safer.
DroneTrace donated the research aircraft behind this work and will keep supporting ICS as the program grows.