Privacy and authenticity of drone communication using chacha20 algorithm

Abstract

The widespread use of unmanned aerial vehicles (also known as drones) has raised security and safety concerns. To counteract the security risks posed by illegal drone flights, an authentication, and security system based on the chaotic maps and stream cipher lightweight chacha20 algorithm is proposed. In addition to security reasons, the proposed system is specifically designed to decrease the consumption of drone resources, minimize the computational time, deal with one ground control station (GCS). The process of the suggested system firstly generates a flight session key using One DimensionChebyshev chaotic map and registers the flight session key and its flight plan into a centralized database. Then ciphering payload data using lightweight chacha20 to increase security of MAVLink communication protocol and send it to GCS. Finally, a GCS checks authentication of the current flight session based on a flight session key and its flight plan as the message authentication code key for every flight session. The experiment results using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) test prove the proposed key generation method can produce unique and random fly session key. Results of the proposed system are done on two different types of data (colored image and text) with different sizes. The best values of encrypted image: Mean Square Error MSE=9036.119576; Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)=8.570983915; Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC)= 0.530654201,and Universal Quality Image (UQI)= 0.508969269. In terms of speed, the chacha20 algorithm is fast in ciphering execution time (worst time=1.4 msec).