ZeroTier Connects Drone Fleets and Counter-Drone Systems with Secure, Resilient Networking

How ZeroTier is helping operators maintain reliable, encrypted communications across commercial drone and counter-UAS applications.

Operating a drone-based inspection to determine the structural integrity of an underground tunnel and maintaining a counter-UAS system to protect a piece of critical infrastructure might seem like completely different – even opposite – activities.

Yet running each kind of operation requires much of the same technologic capabilities, chiefly the ability to maintain secure communication links, despite any natural or manmade challenges to those vital connections.

The ability to ensure secure, encrypted connections within networks is foundational for the operators of drone fleets as well as counter-drone systems, said Robert Stevenson, chief commercial officer at ZeroTier, a two-decade-old company that offers a software-defined networking (SDN) platform for reliable network communications.

“We are commonly used in drone flights, and it can be a swarm of connected drones or a single drone,” Stevenson said. “We’re also used in the counter-drone space as well.”

Stevenson recalled how the competing disciplines of drone fleet operations and counter-UAS operations both were prominently on display at the recent DroneX Trade Show and Conference in London. Vendors hawking their counter-UAS systems were set up in one part of the hall right across from others selling the kind of drones that those same systems were designed to detect, he said.

ZeroTier was working with both sets of vendors.

“What ZeroTier does more specifically is that we are connecting endpoints,” Stevenson said. “In the case of a drone, you’re going to want an endpoint connection that’s very reliable, very resilient. And in some cases, you might have some cybersecurity concerns and encryption concerns around that drone.”

On the counter-UAS side of the equation, the companies selling systems, which deployed some sort of gun or other means to disrupt signals to or from drones, were looking for similar technological solutions to telecommunication challenges.

“They also need some sort of reliable long-range connectivity. You want to be able to connect and control and look at that device regardless of the environment,” he said. “Connectivity that can’t be broken is what it basically comes down to.”

From open-source tech developer to commercial company

ZeroTier was founded as a company in 2013, by software engineer and tech entrepreneur Adam Ierymenko, who develop the initial ZeroTier One as an open-source platform to connects devices, servers and applications into one secure virtual network. Ierymenko currently serves as the company’s chief technology officer.

“He wrote this network overlay connectivity and released it into the wild as an open-source product,” Stevenson said. “It was on GitHub. And a lot of times these products go out there and nothing happens. They just plug in and try it or whatever. But this wasn’t the case with ZeroTier. People found it very useful. It had millions of people using it, endpoint devices and lots of businesses, lots of home users, gamers, some SMEs [small-to-medium enterprises] and light enterprise downloading and using ZeroTier.”

Based on the successful widespread adoption of the technology, Ierymenko and his team decided to form a commercial enterprise. In the early 2000s, the private company raised several million dollars from West Coast-based venture capital funds.

In 2024, Stevenson, an entrepreneur and executive in several high-tech companies, joined the company, the same year that Andrew Gault, co-founder Gaikai, a cloud-based video game streaming-technology company, became CEO of ZeroTier.

With headquarters in San Francisco, ZeroTier operates out of a number of U.S. locations, including Dallas, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon as well as having operations in Europe: in London, The Netherlands and Germany.

As the company expanded to shift its focus from the open-source market to commercial and defense markets, ZeroTier worked to enhance the level of cybersecurity protections for its products. It obtained a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 140 level of security, needed for doing business with U.S. government agencies and contractors, and other advanced security certifications.

Stevenson said that while the company still has a very active customer base in the self-serve, open-source market segment — including gamers, and those who use the platform as a VPN — he foresees a great deal of ZeroTier’s future growth taking place in regulated industries such as defense, government, healthcare, finance and casino gaming.

Company’s evolution follows internet growth

As the internet and the world of telecommunications have evolved over the last 20-plus years, ZeroTier has kept up with the growth, making its platform more user-friendly, strengthening its cybersecurity protections and adding new operating and support systems, Stevenson said.

“What’s happened over time is that the need for solving some of these difficult connectivity challenges has remained. In fact, it’s gotten worse in some ways because the internet and endpoint connections have not stopped growing, and they’re continuing to grow,” he said.

Stevenson estimated that with the rapid progress in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) within the last several years, there will be a billion-some AI agents adding to internet traffic within the next year or two.

“If you look at it from a government standpoint or a defense standpoint, the connectivity challenges that have persisted are getting worse,” he said. “If you’re talking about a defense use case, it could be ground forces, soldiers or vehicles with endpoint connections. It could be drones flying. It could be simply, ‘Hey, I’ve got people at a military base or in some kind of secure location, and I need to VPN them, or I need to a secure connection for them with their mobile phones or their laptops.’”

Similarly, secure communications networks are vital in commercial drone applications in civil engineering work, such as underground tunnel construction or the inspection of hydro-electric dams for cracks or micro-imperfections. Just as in contested battlefield environments, drones operating in such circumstances are vulnerable to having their signals denied by environmental conditions or even jammed or disrupted by hostile actors, Stevenson said.

“Drone technologies are evolving so rapidly, with AI on-board capabilities of having multiple connection points for resilient connections, multi-pathing, those kinds of things,” he said. “ZeroTier can explain how operators can maintain persistent connectivity by keeping multiple communications paths available, shifting traffic rapidly when one path is jammed or lost, and applying identity-based security that follows the device.”