A Survey of Security in UAVs and FANETs: Issues, Threats, Analysis of Attacks, and Solutions

Thanks to the rapidly developing technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are able to complete a number of tasks in cooperation with each other without need for human intervention. In recent years, UAVs, which are widely utilized in military missions, have begun to be deployed in civilian applications and mostly for commercial purposes. With their growing numbers and range of applications, UAVs are becoming more and more popular; on the other hand, they are also the target of various threats which can exploit various vulnerabilities of UAV systems in order to cause destructive effects. It is therefore critical that security is ensured for UAVs and the networks that provide communication between UAVs. In this survey, we aimed to present a comprehensive detailed approach to security by classifying possible attacks against UAVs and flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). We classified the security threats into four major categories that make up the basic structure of UAVs; hardware attacks, software attacks, sensor attacks, and communication attacks. In addition, countermeasures against these attacks are presented in separate groups as prevention and detection. In particular, we focus on the security of FANETs, which face significant security challenges due to their characteristics and are also vulnerable to insider attacks. Therefore, this survey presents a review of the security fundamentals for FANETs, and also four different routing attacks against FANETs are simulated with realistic parameters and then analyzed. Finally, limitations and open issues are also discussed to direct future wor

Monitoring System-Based Flying IoT in Public Health and Sports Using Ant-Enabled Energy-Aware Routing.

In recent decades, the Internet of flying networks has made significant progress. Several aerial vehicles communicate with one another to form flying ad hoc networks. Unmanned aerial vehicles perform a wide range of tasks that make life easier for humans. However, due to the high frequency of mobile flying vehicles, network problems such as packet loss, latency, and perhaps disrupted channel links arise, affecting data delivery. The use of UAV-enabled IoT in sports has changed the dynamics of tracking and working on player safety. WBAN can be merged with aerial vehicles to collect data regarding health and transfer it to a base station. Furthermore, the unbalanced energy usage of flying things will result in earlier mission failure and a rapid decline in network lifespan. This study describes the use of each UAV's residual energy level to ensure a high level of safety using an ant-based routing technique called AntHocNet. In health care, the use of IoT-assisted aerial vehicles would increase operational performance, surveillance, and automation optimization to provide a smart application of flying IoT. Apart from that, aerial vehicles can be used in remote communication for treatment, medical equipment distribution, and telementoring. While comparing routing algorithms, simulation findings indicate that the proposed ant-based routing protocol is optimal

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/

Wildfire Monitoring Based on Energy Efficient Clustering Approach for FANETS

Forest fires are a significant threat to the ecological system’s stability. Several attempts have been made to detect forest fires using a variety of approaches, including optical fire sensors, and satellite-based technologies, all of which have been unsuccessful. In today’s world, research on flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) is a thriving field and can be used successfully. This paper describes a unique clustering approach that identifies the presence of a fire zone in a forest and transfers all sensed data to a base station as soon as feasible via wireless communication. The fire department takes the required steps to prevent the spread of the fire. It is proposed in this study that an efficient clustering approach be used to deal with routing and energy challenges to extend the lifetime of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in case of forest fires. Due to the restricted energy and high mobility, this directly impacts the flying duration and routing of FANET nodes. As a result, it is vital to enhance the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to maintain high system availability. Our proposed algorithm EE-SS regulates the energy usage of nodes while taking into account the features of a disaster region and other factors. For firefighting, sensor nodes are placed throughout the forest zone to collect essential data points for identifying forest fires and dividing them into distinct clusters. All of the sensor nodes in the cluster communicate their packets to the base station continually through the cluster head. When FANET nodes communicate with one another, their transmission range is constantly adjusted to meet their operating requirements. This paper examines the existing clustering techniques for forest fire detection approaches restricted to wireless sensor networks and their limitations. Our newly designed algorithm chooses the most optimum cluster heads (CHs) based on their fitness, reducing the routing overhead and increasing the system’s efficiency. Our proposed method results from simulations are compared with the existing approaches such as LEACH, LEACH-C, PSO-HAS, and SEED. The evaluation is carried out concerning overall energy usage, residual energy, the count of live nodes, the network lifetime, and the time it takes to build a cluster compared to other approaches. As a result, our proposed EE-SS algorithm outperforms all the considered state-of-art algorithms.publishedVersio

An intelligent cluster-based routing scheme in 5G flying ad hoc networks

Flying ad hoc network (FANET) is an application of 5G access network, which consists of unmanned aerial vehicles or flying nodes with scarce resources and high mobility rates. This paper proposes a deep Q-network (DQN)-based vertical routing scheme to select routes with higher residual energy levels and lower mobility rates across network planes (i.e., macro-plane, pico-plane, and femto-plane), which has not been investigated in the literature. The main motivation behind this work is to address frequent link disconnections and network partitions in order to enhance network performance. The 5G access network has a central controller (CC) and distributed controllers (DCs) in different network planes. The proposed scheme is a hybrid approach that allows CC and DCs to exchange information among themselves, and handle global and local information, respectively. The proposed scheme is suitable for highly dynamic ad hoc FANETs, and it enables data communication between UAVs in various applications, such as monitoring and performing surveillance of borders, and targeted-based operations (e.g., object tracking). Vertical routing is performed over a clustered network, in which clusters are formed across different network planes to provide inter-plane and inter-cluster communications. This helps to offload data traffic across different network planes to enhance network lifetime. Compared to the traditional reinforcement learning approach, the proposed DQN-based vertical routing scheme has shown to increase network lifetime by up to 60%, reduce energy consumption by up to 20%, and reduce the rate of link breakages by up to 50%

Improving Security for the Internet of Things: Applications of Blockchain, Machine Learning and Inter-Pulse Interval

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept where physical objects of various sizes can seamlessly connect and communicate with each other without human intervention. The concept covers various applications, including healthcare, utility services, automotive/vehicular transportation, smart agriculture and smart city. The number of interconnected IoT devices has recently grown rapidly as a result of technological advancement in communications and computational systems. Consequently, this trend also highlights the need to address issues associated with IoT, the biggest risk of which is commonly known to be security. This thesis focuses on three selected security challenges from the IoT application areas of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), Internet of Flying Things (IoFT), and human body interface and control systems (HBICS). For each of these challenges, a novel and innovative solution is proposed to address the identified problems. The research contributions of this thesis to the literature can be summarised as follows: • A blockchain-based conditionally anonymised pseudonym management scheme for CAVs, supporting multi-jurisdictional road networks. • A Sybil attack detection scheme for IoFT using machine learning carried out on intrinsically generated physical layer data of radio signals. • A potential approach of using inter-pulse interval (IPI) biometrics for frequency hopping to mitigate jamming attacks on HBICS devices

Simulation based comparison of routing protocols in wireless multihop adhoc networks

Routing protocols are responsible for providing reliable communication between the source and destination nodes. The performance of these protocols in the ad hoc network family is influenced by several factors such as mobility model, traffic load, transmission range, and the number of mobile nodes which represents a great issue. Several simulation studies have explored routing protocol with performance parameters, but few relate to various protocols concerning routing and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. This paper presents a simulation-based comparison of proactive, reactive, and multipath routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Specifically, the performance of AODV, DSDV, and AOMDV protocols are evaluated and analyzed in the presence of varying the number of mobile nodes, pause time, and traffic connection numbers. Moreover, Routing and QoS performance metrics such as normalized routing load, routing packet, packet delivery ratio, packet drop, end-to-end delay, and throughput are measured to conduct a performance comparison between three routing protocols. Simulation results indicate that AODV outperforms the DSDV and AOMDV protocols in most of the metrics. AOMDV is better than DSDV in terms of end-to-end delay. DSDV provides lower throughput performance results. Network topology parameters have a slight impact on AODV Performance

Mobile Oriented Future Internet (MOFI)

This Special Issue consists of seven papers that discuss how to enhance mobility management and its associated performance in the mobile-oriented future Internet (MOFI) environment. The first two papers deal with the architectural design and experimentation of mobility management schemes, in which new schemes are proposed and real-world testbed experimentations are performed. The subsequent three papers focus on the use of software-defined networks (SDN) for effective service provisioning in the MOFI environment, together with real-world practices and testbed experimentations. The remaining two papers discuss the network engineering issues in newly emerging mobile networks, such as flying ad-hoc networks (FANET) and connected vehicular networks