Improving Drone Security in Smart Cities via Lightweight Cryptography.

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly popular. It is estimated that the UAV market will continue to grow to reach $27.4 billion by 2030. The ability of UAVs to travel long distances and acquire and process information has made these devices suitable in many areas. On the other hand, their widespread use has made UAVs an attractive target for cyberattacks. More precisely, most of such attacks are targeted to the MAVLink , which is the main communication protocol used by UAVs. In this paper, we first focus on the main MAVLink security protocol, namely, the MAVSec protocol. MAVSec uses cryptography to encrypt messages exchanged between the UAV and ground control station (GCS) . However, several security weaknesses still affect the MAVSec protocol, mainly resulting from the lack of authentication and key exchange between UAV and GCS. To overcome the limitations of this protocol, we introduce a novel and modular security architecture based on lightweight cryptography [ 10 , 16 ]. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution have been assessed through a proof of concept implemented using the software in the loop (SITL) simulator.