Work

Secure LoRa Drone-to-Drone Communication for Public Blockchain-Based UAV Traffic Management

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) face collision risks due to Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations. Therefore, UAV Traffic Management (UTM) systems are used to manage and monitor UAV flight paths. However, centralized UTM systems are susceptible to various security attacks and are inefficient in managing flight data from different service providers. It further fails to provide low-latency communication required for UAV real-time operations. Thus, this paper proposes to integrate Drone-to-Drone (D2D) communication protocol into a secure public blockchain-based UTM system to enable direct communication between UAVs for efficient collision avoidance. The D2D protocol is designed using SHA256 hash function and bitwise XOR operations. A proof of concept has been built to verify that the UTM system is secure by enabling authorized service providers to view sensitive flight data only using legitimate secret keys. The security of the protocol has been analyzed and has been proven to be secure from key disclosure, adversary-in-the-middle, replay, and tracking attacks. Its performance has been evaluated and is proven to outperform existing studies by having the lowest computation cost of 0.01 ms and storage costs of 544-800 bits.

Source: Sensors

DOI: 10.3390/s25165087

Authors: Jing Huey Khor, Michail Sidorov, Melissa Jia Ying Chong

Institution: University of Southampton Malaysia

Language: English

Topic: Advanced Authentication Protocols Security

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,137