A Secure Communication Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Mavlink is a lightweight and most widely used open-source communication protocol used for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Multiple UAVs and autopilot systems support it, and it provides bi-directional communication between the UAV and Ground Control Station. The communications contain critical information about the UAV status and basic control commands sent from GCS to UAV and UAV to GCS. In order to increase the transfer speed and efficiency, the Mavlink does not encrypt the messages. As a result, the protocol is vulnerable to various security attacks such as Eavesdropping, GPS Spoofing, and DDoS. In this study, we tackle the problem and secure the Mavlink communication protocol. By leveraging the Mavlink packet’s vulnerabilities, this research work introduces an experiment in which, first, the Mavlink packets are com

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Correspondence to Guillermo LóPez Juan.

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Navid Ali. A Secure Communication Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (JESTEC). 15. 13(2022) http://jestec.org/

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Keywords

  • UAvs
  • CS