Towards a trusted unmanned aerial system using blockchain (BUAS) for the protection of critical infrastructure

With the exponential growth in the number of vital infrastructures such as nuclear plants and transport and distribution networks, these systems have become more susceptible to coordinated cyber attacks. One of the effective approaches used to strengthen the security of these infrastructures is the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for surveillance and data collection. However, UAVs themselves are prone to attacks on their collected sensor data. Recently, Blockchain (BC) has been proposed as a revolutionary technology which can be integrated within IoT to provide a desired level of security and privacy. However, the integration of BC within IoT networks, where UAV's sensors constitute a major component, is extremely challenging. The major contribution of this study is two-fold. (1) survey of the security issues for UAV's collected sensor data, define the security requirements for such systems, and identify ways to address them. (2) propose a novel Blockchain-based solution to ensure the security of, and the trust between the UAVs and their relevant ground control stations (GCS). Our implementation results and analysis show that using UAVs as means for protecting critical infrastructure is greatly enhanced through the utilization of trusted Blockchain-based Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs).N/

Utah State Engineer, Fall 2020

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Machine Learning for Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Networking

Fueled by the advancement of 5G new radio (5G NR), rapid development has occurred in many fields. Compared with the conventional approaches, beamforming and network slicing enable 5G NR to have ten times decrease in latency, connection density, and experienced throughput than 4G long term evolution (4G LTE). These advantages pave the way for the evolution of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) on a large scale. The reduction of consumption, the advancement of control engineering, and the simplification of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) enable the UAS networking deployment on a large scale to become feasible. The UAS networking can finish multiple complex missions simultaneously. However, the limitations of the conventional approaches are still a big challenge to make a trade-off between the massive management and efficient networking on a large scale. With 5G NR and machine learning, in this dissertation, my contributions can be summarized as the following: I proposed a novel Optimized Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (OAODV) routing protocol to improve the throughput of Intra UAS networking. The novel routing protocol can reduce the system overhead and be efficient. To improve the security, I proposed a blockchain scheme to mitigate the malicious basestations for cellular connected UAS networking and a proof-of-traffic (PoT) to improve the efficiency of blockchain for UAS networking on a large scale. Inspired by the biological cell paradigm, I proposed the cell wall routing protocols for heterogeneous UAS networking. With 5G NR, the inter connections between UAS networking can strengthen the throughput and elasticity of UAS networking. With machine learning, the routing schedulings for intra- and inter- UAS networking can enhance the throughput of UAS networking on a large scale. The inter UAS networking can achieve the max-min throughput globally edge coloring. I leveraged the upper and lower bound to accelerate the optimization of edge coloring. This dissertation paves a way regarding UAS networking in the integration of CPS and machine learning. The UAS networking can achieve outstanding performance in a decentralized architecture. Concurrently, this dissertation gives insights into UAS networking on a large scale. These are fundamental to integrating UAS and National Aerial System (NAS), critical to aviation in the operated and unmanned fields. The dissertation provides novel approaches for the promotion of UAS networking on a large scale. The proposed approaches extend the state-of-the-art of UAS networking in a decentralized architecture. All the alterations can contribute to the establishment of UAS networking with CPS

UAVouch : a distributed drone identity and location validation mechanism

As aplicações emergentes de vigilância, com equipes de VANTs, dependem de comunicação segura para trocar informações, coordenar seus movimentos e cumprir os objetivos da missão. Proteger a rede identificando o acesso de nós mal-intencionados tentando perturbar o sistema é uma tarefa importante, e particularmente sensível no domínio militar. Observando essa necessidade, este artigo apresenta o design e a avaliação do UAVouch: Um esquema distribuído de validação de localização e identidade de drones que combina uma autenticação baseada em chave pública com uma verificação de plausibilidade de movimento para grupos de VANTs. A ideia principal do UAVouch complementa o mecanismo de autenticação, verificando periodicamente a plausibilidade da localização dos VANTs vizinhos, permitindo a detecção de intrusos que não conseguem seguir as trajetórias esperadas. A solução proposta foi avaliada em simulação através de um cenário de vigilância militar, no qual detectou-se ataques de falsificação de posição de nós mal-intencionados com precisão em média acima de 85%.Emerging surveillance applications of UAV teams rely on secure communication to exchange information, coordinate their movements, and fulfill mission objectives. Protecting the network by identifying malicious nodes access trying to disturb the system is an important task, which is particularly sensitive in the military domain. Observing this need, this paper presents the design and evaluation of UAVouch: an identity and location validation scheme combining a public-key based authentication with a movement plausibility check for groups of UAVs. The key idea of UAVouch supplement the authentication mechanism by periodically checking the plausibility of the location of neighboring UAVs, allowing the detection of intruders that are unable to follow expected trajectories. The proposed solution was evaluated in a simulated military surveillance scenario in which it detects malicious nodes’ position falsification attacks with an accuracy on average above 85%

The Internet of Everything

In the era before IoT, the world wide web, internet, web 2.0 and social media made people’s lives comfortable by providing web services and enabling access personal data irrespective of their location. Further, to save time and improve efficiency, there is a need for machine to machine communication, automation, smart computing and ubiquitous access to personal devices. This need gave birth to the phenomenon of Internet of Things (IoT) and further to the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE)

The Internet of Everything

In the era before IoT, the world wide web, internet, web 2.0 and social media made people’s lives comfortable by providing web services and enabling access personal data irrespective of their location. Further, to save time and improve efficiency, there is a need for machine to machine communication, automation, smart computing and ubiquitous access to personal devices. This need gave birth to the phenomenon of Internet of Things (IoT) and further to the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE)

A survey of multi-access edge computing in 5G and beyond : fundamentals, technology integration, and state-of-the-art

Driven by the emergence of new compute-intensive applications and the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT), it is foreseen that the emerging 5G network will face an unprecedented increase in traffic volume and computation demands. However, end users mostly have limited storage capacities and finite processing capabilities, thus how to run compute-intensive applications on resource-constrained users has recently become a natural concern. Mobile edge computing (MEC), a key technology in the emerging fifth generation (5G) network, can optimize mobile resources by hosting compute-intensive applications, process large data before sending to the cloud, provide the cloud-computing capabilities within the radio access network (RAN) in close proximity to mobile users, and offer context-aware services with the help of RAN information. Therefore, MEC enables a wide variety of applications, where the real-time response is strictly required, e.g., driverless vehicles, augmented reality, robotics, and immerse media. Indeed, the paradigm shift from 4G to 5G could become a reality with the advent of new technological concepts. The successful realization of MEC in the 5G network is still in its infancy and demands for constant efforts from both academic and industry communities. In this survey, we first provide a holistic overview of MEC technology and its potential use cases and applications. Then, we outline up-to-date researches on the integration of MEC with the new technologies that will be deployed in 5G and beyond. We also summarize testbeds and experimental evaluations, and open source activities, for edge computing. We further summarize lessons learned from state-of-the-art research works as well as discuss challenges and potential future directions for MEC research

Blockchain-enabled cybersecurity provision for scalable heterogeneous network: A comprehensive survey

Blockchain-enabled cybersecurity system to ensure and strengthen decentralized digital transaction is gradually gaining popularity in the digital era for various areas like finance, transportation, healthcare, education, and supply chain management. Blockchain interactions in the heterogeneous network have fascinated more attention due to the authentication of their digital application exchanges. However, the exponential development of storage space capabilities across the blockchain-based heterogeneous network has become an important issue in preventing blockchain distribution and the extension of blockchain nodes. There is the biggest challenge of data integrity and scalability, including significant computing complexity and inapplicable latency on regional network diversity, operating system diversity, bandwidth diversity, node diversity, etc., for decision-making of data transactions across blockchain-based heterogeneous networks. Data security and privacy have also become the main concerns across the heterogeneous network to build smart IoT ecosystems. To address these issues, today’s researchers have explored the potential solutions of the capability of heterogeneous network devices to perform data transactions where the system stimulates their integration reliably and securely with blockchain. The key goal of this paper is to conduct a state-of-the-art and comprehensive survey on cybersecurity enhancement using blockchain in the heterogeneous network. This paper proposes a full-fledged taxonomy to identify the main obstacles, research gaps, future research directions, effective solutions, and most relevant blockchain-enabled cybersecurity systems. In addition, Blockchain based heterogeneous network framework with cybersecurity is proposed in this paper to meet the goal of maintaining optimal performance data transactions among organizations. Overall, this paper provides an in-depth description based on the critical analysis to overcome the existing work gaps for future research where it presents a potential cybersecurity design with key requirements of blockchain across a heterogeneous network