UAV

Secure UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) Protocols of the future. By Lisa Christian.

Currently Mavlink is the protocol, used for drones (UAVs). However, this protocol has been found to be subject to spoofing, jamming, gps stealing and in one instance, the camera footage was changed and uploaded with their own footage. So its subject to being hacked.

To overcome this problem, there are new protocols being developed to prevent wireless hacking.

Drones are important to aerospace, military and agriculture. For example, in agriculture, they can help the farmer to know how they're harvest is going, without manually inspecting very large areas.

In military, it could be used for surveillance and in aerospace they can be use for discovery.

One problem with the current protocols, is that they are subject to spectrum sharing.

Say a drone gets hacked, you could lose its position, lose the information its looking at and even competitors in the market, could see the information, that really should be able to be kept private.

“Since that information transmitted to/by UAVs is mainly over the air, and most of the information transferred are highly sensitive and critical [5], security is a primary concern in UAV communications. Therefore, the security of these channels in UAV systems is one of the essential requirements for robust communication between UAVs and/or between UAVs and the Ground Control Station (GCS) “.(Sensors (Basel). 2021.)

Even UAV hijacking is possible, in DJI UAVs.

“In general, UAVs lack suitable security mechanisms that protect them from various attacks while taking a good balance between performance and safety”.(Sensors (Basel). 2021.)

Both the UAV and the Ground Control Station (GCS), need to be secure.

The new proposed security protocols are SP-D2GS (Security Protocol for Drone-to-Ground Control Station) and SP-D2MD (Security Protocol for Drone-to-Monitoring Drone).

These are made with Raspberry-Pi.

A security analysis on these protocols, can be conducted with tools called BAN-logic and Scyther.

They use a Linux based ground control system.

- The new security protocols, should help to secure authentication, confidentiality and availability.

References: Sensors (Basel). 2021. 'Drone Secure Communication Protocol for Future Sensitive Applications in Military Zone'. Accessed from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8000982/ on: 11/1/24.