Emerging use of UAV’s: secure communication protocol issues and challenges

Khan, Navid Ali; Jhanjhi, Noor Zaman; Brohi, Sarfraz Nawaz; Nayyar, Anand

Abstract

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)/drones have gained popularity in many areas due to their widely used applications. They are used extensively in military and civil applications such as search and rescue, reconnaissance, monitoring of the environment and traffic, entertainment, and logistics. UAVs usually operate with the assistance of various communication protocols, such as MAVLink, UranusLink, UAVCan, from a remote control or a ground control station (GCS). These protocols of communication are used for messages exchange. These messages contain important UAV status information and control commands that are sent from GCS to the UAV and GCS to the UAV, although these protocols offer better communication. However, most of the messages are not subtle, and there is no delicate way to secure such messages and are vulnerable to several security threats, including man-in-the-middle attack, DoS attack, packet data injection attack, and eavesdropping. It can lead to severe consequences, for example, a UAV crash, stealing important military operation data, falsifying reports in a reconnaissance or search and rescue operation, and much more. A new secure communication protocol is therefore required to ensure that the necessary safety standards for the communication of UAVs are met. This chapter gives an overview of UAV, their working mechanism, types, different communication protocols which are used for communication among UAVs. It also discusses the issues related to these communication protocols and propose a new secure communication protocol for UAVs.

• Online Publication Date: Jun 5, 2020
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Sep 9, 2022
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Pages: 37-55
• Book Title: Drones in Smart-Cities: Security and Performance
• Chapter Number: 3
• ISBN: 9780128204306
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-819972-5.00003-3
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9944002
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128199725000033?via%3Dihub
• Related Public URLs: https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128199725/drones-in-smart-cities