WIP: Consortium Blockchain for Secure Data Acquisition using UAVs as Sensing Devices

Abstract

Autonomous inspection and measurement have become an integral part of smart IoT ecosystem. Low cost mobile and static sensing devices have leveraged the concept of smart factory in different industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, transportation etc. However, in case of remote sensing where the sensing devices are at distant locations it becomes infeasible for the central data aggregator or control center to evaluate the integrity and authenticity of the sensing data. This situation becomes even worse in case of compromised sensing devices due to cyber-attacks such as forged identity, spoofing, false data injection etc. This work in progress paper proposes a novel idea for blockchain based distributed sensing data aggregation scheme for UAV swarms. This distributed system could detect the malicious actors (sensors) without the intervention of central authority and thus enhances the integrity of the sensing data. In order to eliminate the payloads on the on-board UAVs, we have leveraged the storage capacity of the network edge components for storing the blockchain ledger of the network. We also explored and developed different threat models for UAV information acquisition networks.