Secure communication in civil drones

Abstract

The drone technology is attracting an increasing attention in civil applications. Secure communication is a critical requirement in many scenarios to provide an acceptable level of data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In this chapter we first present a security analysis of civil drones. Then, a light-weight hardware solution is proposed to assure the confidentiality and integrity of both command data sent by the ground station and payload data transmitted by the drone. Using the developed prototype, finally, we investigate the impact of hardware accelerators on the power consumption of these power-constrained devices.We show that the advantage of hardware as a power-efficient computation platform is not necessarily valid for drones due to the extra hardware weight.