DroneSig: Lightweight Digital Signature Protocol for Micro Aerial Vehicles

Micro aerial vehicles a.k.a. drones, have become an integral part of a variety of civilian and military application domains, including but not limited to aerial surveying and mapping, aerial surveillance and security, aerial inspection of infrastructure, and aerial delivery. Meanwhile, the cybersecurity of drones is gaining significant attention due to both financial and strategic information and value involved in aerial applications. As a result of the lack of security features in the communication protocol, an adversary can easily interfere with on-going communications or even seize control of the drone. In this thesis, we propose a lightweight digital signature protocol, also referred to as DroneSig, to protect drones from a man-in-the-middle attack, where an adversary eavesdrops the communication between Ground Control Station (GCS) and drone, and impersonates the GCS and sends fake commands to terminate the on-going mission or even take control over the drone. The basic idea of the DroneSig is that the drone will only execute the new command after validating the received digital signature from the GCS, proving that the new command message is coming from the authenticated GCS. If the validation of the digital signature fails, the new command is rejected immediately, and the Return-to-Launch (RTL) mode is initiated and forces the drone to return to the take-off position. We conduct extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation and comparison using OMNeT++, and simulation results show that the proposed lightweight digital signature protocol achieves better performance in terms of energy consumption and computation time compared to the standard Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic technique

PRIVACY-AWARE AND HARDWARE-BASED ACCLERATION AUTHENTICATION SCHEME FOR INTERNET OF DRONES

Drones are becoming increasingly present into today’s society through many different means such as outdoor sports, surveillance, delivery of goods etc. With such a rapid increase, a means of control and monitoring is needed as the drones become more interconnected and readily available. Thus, the idea of Internet of drones (IoD) is formed, an infrastructure in place to do those types of things. However, without an authentication system in place anyone could gain access or control to real time data to multiple drones within an area. This is a problem that I choose to tackle using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that accelerates the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) encryption algorithm making it a hardware component. This will allow me to synthesis and implement the three parts of my privacy-aware and hardware-based authentication scheme for internet of drones. I use Vivado and Vivado HLS to obtain results for my authentication scheme. My scheme was able to perform large computational expensive tasks faster than other proposed IoD schemes

A Trusted Platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Bridge Inspection Management System

Bridge inspection has a pivotal role in assuring the safety of critical structures constituting society. However, high cost, worker safety, and low objectivity of quality are classic problems in traditional visual inspection. Recent trends in bridge inspection have led to a proliferation of research utilizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This thesis proposes a Trusted Platform for Bridge Inspection Management System (Trusted-BIMS) for safe and efficient bridge inspection by proving the UAV-based inspection process and improving the prototype of the previous study. Designed based on a Zero-Trust (ZT) strategy, Trusted-BIMS consist of (1) a database-driven web framework with security features for bridge inspection management, (2) a mobile interface supporting the inspection data collection using UAVs, and (3) a mutual authentication protocol for the Internet of Things (IoTs). The server script language used to implement the web system was PHP and React Native was used for the mobile application development. The secure communication algorithm used server-side PHP and client-side JavaScript, and MySQL was adopted as the database. This paper provides an overview and details of Trusted-BIMS and demonstrates the overall process of bridge inspection using UAVs and applied technologies to the proposed platform. The result of this research will make an important contribution to the field of UAV-based bridge inspection. Further research can be conducted on refined implementations of security algorithms, more comprehensive security schemes, and machine learning technology to reduce human intervention

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Wireless Communications and Networking

The emerging massive density of human-held and machine-type nodes implies larger traffic deviatiolns in the future than we are facing today. In the future, the network will be characterized by a high degree of flexibility, allowing it to adapt smoothly, autonomously, and efficiently to the quickly changing traffic demands both in time and space. This flexibility cannot be achieved when the network’s infrastructure remains static. To this end, the topic of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have enabled wireless communications, and networking has received increased attention. As mentioned above, the network must serve a massive density of nodes that can be either human-held (user devices) or machine-type nodes (sensors). If we wish to properly serve these nodes and optimize their data, a proper wireless connection is fundamental. This can be achieved by using UAV-enabled communication and networks. This Special Issue addresses the many existing issues that still exist to allow UAV-enabled wireless communications and networking to be properly rolled out