Natural or man-made disasters pose significant challenges for delivering critical relief to affected populations due to disruptions in critical infrastructures and logistics networks. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-aided disaster relief networks (UDRNs) leverage UAVs to assist existing ground relief networks by swiftly assessing affected areas and timely delivering lifesaving supplies. To meet the growing demands for collaborative, trust-free, and transparent UDRN services, blockchain-based UDRNs emerge as a promising approach through immutable ledgers and distributed smart contracts. However, several efficiency and security challenges hinder the deployment of blockchain-based UDRNs, including the lack of cooperation between smart contracts, lack of dynamic audit for smart contract vulnerabilities, and low forensics robustness against transaction malleability attacks. Towards efficient and secure blockchain-based UDRNs, this paper presents potential solutions: (i) a series of collaborative smart contracts for coordinated relief management, (ii) a dynamic contract audit mechanism to prevent known/unknown contract vulnerabilities; and (iii) a robust transaction forensics strategy with on/off-chain cooperation to resist transaction malleability attacks. Our prototype implementation and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Lastly, we outline key open research issues crucial to advancing this emerging field.
In smart farming, information and communication technologies such as IoT are driving the agricultural industry towards improved efficiency and productivity while reducing human intervention. As agricultural systems become increasingly connected to the Internet, they provide many new opportunities but also introduce new challenges. Connecting such systems to a network exposes them to cyberattacks and vulnerabilities; therefore, security and privacy are important challenges that should be addressed. Specifically, because of the distinct characteristics of smart farming such as environmental and farm conditions, security solutions suitable for smart farming are indispensable. In this paper, we propose a location verification (LV) protocol as a security solution for autonomous and intelligent moving devices such as drones and robots deployed in smart farming. Moreover, as an application of the proposed LV protocol, we propose a blockchain-based secure drone rental mechanism for smart farming. We present a security analysis in which the proposed LV protocol and rental mechanism are secure against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, modification, replay, and relay attacks, with the rental mechanism providing mutual authentication. Through a performance evaluation of the LV protocol in terms of the communication overhead, computation cost, and storage cost and a performance evaluation of the blockchain for drone rental with regard to throughput and latency, we confirm the feasibility and efficiency of the LV protocol and drone rental mechanism in the smart farming.
Seyed Mohammad Hashemi, Ruxandra Mihaela Botez, Georges Ghazi
This paper introduces an innovative consensus algorithm for managing Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic (UTM) through blockchain technology, a highly secure consensus protocol, to allocate airspace. A smart contract was developed on the Ethereum blockchain for allocating airspace. This technique enables the division of the swarm flight zone into smaller sectors to decrease the computational complexity of the algorithm. A decentralized voting system was established within these segmented flight zones, utilizing two primary methodologies: Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). By employing 1000 UAS-S4s across various locations and heading angles, a swarm flight zone was generated. The efficiency of the devised decentralized consensus system was assessed based on error rate and validation time. Despite PoS displaying greater efficiency in cumulative probability for block execution, the comparative analysis indicated PoW outperformed PoS concerning the potential for conflicts among UASs.
Alexander Keith, Thanigajan Sangarapillai, Abdulaziz Almehmadi, Khalil El‐Khatib
The increasing popularity and usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has brought about new challenges in airspace management. With the number of drones expected to grow even further in the coming years, there is an urgent need for an autonomous traffic management system (TMS) that can safely and effectively manage drone traffic in the airspace. It is critical that this TMS be built with principles of the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) triad. In this paper, a traffic management system for UAVs is presented that takes advantage of a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. The TMS provides a decentralized and secure method to manage and deconflict drone flight paths, allowing for safe navigation in crowded airspaces. Through a series of simulated experiments, we demonstrated the system’s capabilities in handling path creation, multiple conflict resolutions, and large numbers of drones. Simulated tests showed that the proposed system was able to handle deconfliction of 1000 drones inside of a one square kilometer, and returned calculated paths for drones in 60 to 2000 ms with up to 100 deconflictions. The Hyperledger Fabric powered traffic management system showcased the potential to leverage permissioned blockchain technology in improving drone traffic management.
Xiaoyu Du, Song Tao, Ke Yuan, Yinyin Li · 5 authors
Abstract Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms not only expanded the application areas of UAVs but also brought more complex challenges to security. Both the data collected by UAVs and UAVs themselves are easy targets for hackers. Once a hacker has intercepted communication information or hijacked a UAV, it can cause the disclosure of information and even affect the normal flight of the UAV. In terms of authentication, existing research focuses on building peer-to-peer networks through devices that support blockchain deployments at the edge nodes to form blockchain networks. UAVs cannot run blockchains directly, so fog nodes need to be introduced to assist UAVs in achieving authentication. This paper proposes a UAV authentication solution based on the fog node-assisted blockchain. The solution incorporates smart contracts to ensure trust, along with on-chain registration and authentication for UAVs. In the design of this paper, the main use is made of fog nodes at the edge of each block. The fog nodes serve as agents to register and authenticate the UAVs in their area on the blockchain, thus enabling the authentication of UAVs in different fog node areas. In this paper, the analysis of gas consumption yields a total economic benefit cost of about $$\yen $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>¥</mml:mo> </mml:math> 12.77, which is negligible for the safety of the UAVs. Meanwhile, the paper compares the computational overheads, and within 10 UAVs, the computational overhead of this scheme is less than 50 ms, which is significantly lower than the other two schemes.
The modern warfare scenario has immense challenges that can risk personnel's lives, highlighting the need for data acquisition to win a military operation successfully. In this context, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a significant role by covertly acquiring reconnaissance data from an enemy location to make the friendly troops aware. The acquired data is mission-critical and needs to be secured from the intruders, which can implicitly manipulate it for their benefit. Moreover, UAVs collect a large amount of data, including high-definition images and surveillance videos; handling such a massive amount of data is a bottleneck on traditional communication networks. To mitigate these issues, this article proposes a blockchain and machine learning (ML)-based secure and intelligent UAV communication underlying sixth-generation (6G) networks, that is, Block-USB. The proposed system refrain the disclosure of highly-sensitive military operations from intruders (either a rogue UAV or a malicious controller). The proposed system uses off-chain storage, that is, Interplanetary file system (IPFS), to improve the blockchain storage capacity. We also present a case study on securing UAV-based military operations by considering multiple scenarios considering controller/UAV malicious. The performance of the proposed system outperforms the traditional baseline 4G/5G and non IPFS-based systems in terms of classification accuracy, communication latency, and data scalability.
Amit Kumar Mishra, Mohammad Wazid, Devesh Pratap Singh, Ashok Kumar Das · 6 authors
One of the most significant recent advances in technology is the advent of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), i.e., drones. They have widened the scope of possible applications and provided a platform for a wide range of creative responses to a variety of challenges. The Internet of Drones (IoD) is a relatively new concept that has arisen as a consequence of the combination of drones and the Internet. The fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks (i.e., drones in networks beyond 5G) are promising solutions for achieving safe drone operations and applications. They may have many applications, like surveillance or urban areas, security, surveillance, retaliation, delivering items, smart farming, film production, capturing nature videos, and many more. Due to the fact that it is susceptible to a wide variety of cyber-attacks, there are certain concerns regarding the privacy and security of IoD communications. In this paper, a secure blockchain-enabled authentication key management framework with the big data analytics feature for drones in networks beyond 5G applications is proposed (in short, SBBDA-IoD). The security of SBBDA-IoD against multiple attacks is demonstrated through a detailed security analysis. The Scyther tool is used to perform a formal security verification test on the SBBDA-IoD’s security, confirming the system’s resistance to various potential attacks. A detailed comparative analysis has identified that SBBDA-IoD outperforms the other schemes by a significant margin. Finally, a real-world implementation of SBBDA-IoD is shown to evaluate its effect on several measures of performance.
Chengzu Dong, Jingwen Zhou, Qi An, Frank Jiang · 7 authors
In recent years, edge-based intelligent UAV delivery systems have attracted significant interest from both the academic and industrial sectors. One key obstacle faced by these smart UAV delivery systems is data privacy, as they rely on vast amounts of data from users and UAVs for training machine learning models for person re-identification (ReID) purposes. To tackle this issue, federated learning (FL) has been extensively adopted as a promising solution since it only involves sharing and updating model parameters with a central server, without transferring raw data. However, traditional FL still suffers from the problem of having a single point of failure. In this study, we present a performance optimization method for federated person re-identification using benchmark analysis in blockchain-powered edge-based smart UAV delivery systems. Our method integrates a decentralized FL mechanism enabled by blockchain, which eliminates the necessity for a central server and stores private data on a decentralized permissioned blockchain, thus preventing a single point of failure. We employ the person ReID application in intelligent UAV delivery systems as a representative example to drive our research and examine privacy concerns. Additionally, we introduce the Federated Re-identification Consensus (FRC) protocol to address the scalability issue of the blockchain in supporting UAV delivery systems. The efficiency of our proposed method is illustrated through experiments on energy efficiency, confirmation time, and throughput. We also explore the effects of the incentive mechanism and analyze the system’s resilience under various security attacks. This study offers valuable insights and potential solutions for addressing data privacy and security challenges in the fast-growing domain of smart UAV delivery systems.
The recently accentuated features of augmenting conventional wireless networks with high altitude platform systems (HAPS) have fueled a plethora of applications, which promise to offer new services to ground users, as well to enhance the efficiency and pervasion of existing applications. Cloud-enabled HAPS, which aims to create HAPS-based datacenters that offer cloud services to users, has particularly emerged as a promising key enabler to provide large-scale equitable services from the sky. Although offering cloud services from the HAPS proves to be efficient, its practical deployment at the stratosphere level still faces many challenges such as high energy requirements, physical maintenance, and is particularly prone to security considerations. Safeguarding the cloud-enabled HAPS against various cyberattacks is a necessity to guarantee its safe operation. This paper proposes a blockchain model to secure cloud-enabled HAPS networks that contain a large number of HAPS stations from recurring cyberattacks within the context of the environment and infrastructure monitoring (EIM) application. To this end, the paper first presents a detailed blockchain framework, and describes the ways of integrating the developed framework into the various system components. We then discuss the details of the system implementation, including the storing and consuming of cloud transactions, the generation of new blocks, and the blockchain consensus protocol that is tailored to the EIM requirements. Finally, we present numerical simulations that illustrate the performance of the system in terms of throughput, latency, and resilience to attacks.
Global warming and climate change are responsible for many disasters. Floods pose a serious risk and require immediate management and strategies for optimal response times. Technology can respond in place of humans in emergencies by providing information. As one of these emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, drones are controlled in their amended systems by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this study, we propose a secure method of flood detection in Saudi Arabia using a Flood Detection Secure System (FDSS) based on deep active learning (DeepAL) based classification model in federated learning to minimize communication costs and maximize global learning accuracy. We use blockchain-based federated learning and partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) for privacy protection and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to share optimal solutions. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) addresses issues with limited block storage and issues posed by high gradients of information transmitted in blockchains. In addition to enhancing security, FDSS can prevent malicious users from compromising or altering data. Utilizing images and IoT data, FDSS can train local models that detect and monitor floods. A homomorphic encryption technique is used to encrypt each locally trained model and gradient to achieve ciphertext-level model aggregation and model filtering, which ensures that the local models can be verified while maintaining privacy. The proposed FDSS enabled us to estimate the flooded areas and track the rapid changes in dam water levels to gauge the flood threat. The proposed methodology is straightforward, easily adaptable, and offers recommendations for Saudi Arabian decision-makers and local administrators to address the growing danger of flooding. This study concludes with a discussion of the proposed method and its challenges in managing floods in remote regions using artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
C. Suganthi Evangeline, Ashmiya Lenin, Vinoth Babu Kumaravelu
In a smart city environment, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) enables the vehicle to generate and communicate messages for safety applications. There exists a challenge where the integrity of the message needs to be verified before passing it on to other vehicles. There should be a provision to motivate the honest vehicles who are reporting the true event messages. To achieve this, traffic regulations and event detections can be linked with blockchain technology. Any vehicle violating traffic rules will be issued with a penalty by executing the smart contract. In case any accident occurs, the vehicle nearby to the spot can immediately send the event message to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). It will check for its credibility and proceed with rewards. The authenticity of the vehicle inside the smart city area is verified by registering itself with UAVs deployed near the city entrance. This is enabled to reduce the participation of unauthorized vehicles inside the city zone. The Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA256) and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA-192) are used for communication. The result of computation time for certificate generation and vehicles involvement rate is presented.
Abdullah Aljumah, Tariq Ahamed Ahanger, Imdad Ullah
Unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, and internet of things (IoT) based devices have acquired significant traction due to their enhanced usefulness. The primary use is aerial surveying of restricted or inaccessible locations. Based on the aforementioned aspects, the current study provides a method based on blockchain technology for ensuring the safety and confidentiality of data collected by virtual circuit-based devices. To test the efficacy of the suggested technique, an IoT-based application is integrated with a simulated vehicle monitoring system. Pentatope-based elliptic curve encryption and secure hash algorithm (SHA) are employed to provide anonymity in data storage. The cloud platform stores technical information, authentication, integrity, and vehicular responses. Additionally, the Ethbalance MetaMask wallet is used for BCN-based transactions. Conspicuously, the suggested technique aids in the prevention of several attacks, including plaintext attacks and ciphertext attacks, on sensitive information. When compared to the state-of-the-art techniques, the outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of the suggested method in terms of operational cost (2.95 units), scalability (14.98 units), reliability (96.07%), and stability (0.82).
Jamal Habibi Markani, Abdessamad Amrhar, Jean-Marc Gagné, René Landry
In the next generation modernization plan, the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system plays a pivotal role. However, the ADS-B’s low level of security and its vulnerabilities have raised valid concerns. The main objectives of this paper are to highlight the limitations of legacy ADS-B systems and to assess the feasibility of using Format-preserving (F), Feistel-based encryption (F), with multiple implementation variances (X) (FFX) algorithms, for enhancing ADS-B’s security. The offered solution is implemented in a standard software-defined radio (SDR) ADS-B to be utilized in real-time applications. Furthermore, a new proposed blockchain scheme is used as a secured database to manage the cipher key. The metric of message entropy is used to assess an algorithm’s ability to confuse and diffuse predictable ADS-B messages; correlation and serial correlation of plain data and cipher data are deployed to evaluate the proposed method’s security level. The authors provide both MATLAB simulations and flight test outcomes to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. Based on our security analysis, ADS-B information can be kept confidential through our scheme. The performance evaluation results reveal that the proposed scheme is achievable, compatible, and efficient for the avionics industry.
With the continuous development of communication technology, drones are playing an important role in many fields, such as power transmission line inspection and agricultural pesticide spraying. In order to protect the data privacy and communication security of drones, many experts are considering blockchain as its enabling technology. However, due to their small size and limited power storage, drones cannot support energy-intensive blockchain applications. In addition, the future 6G communications need to implement an important key performance indicator, namely extremely low-power communications (ELPCs). As a consequence, research into green blockchain is becoming more and more popular. The broadcast of the blockchain is one of the most energy-intensive parts because it entails flooding and there are a lot of unnecessary communication processes. Therefore, in order to make blockchain more suitable for ELPC requirements in 6G communications and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, we took the blockchain broadcast as an improvement candidate and designed LECast, a low-energy-consumption protocol. LECast first analyzes the energy consumption model of the communication between two drones and constructs the shortest-path broadcast tree (SPB Tree) for the UAV networks to minimize energy consumption. Meanwhile, to make the sending drone address the receiving drone in a more convenient way, we proposed an extended Huffman coding (EHC) scheme to name the drones. Furthermore, the other issues with the broadcast tree are reliability and security. When a channel fails, subsequent drones cannot smoothly receive the transaction or block data. As a result, we introduced multichannel transmission with splitting data (MTSD); that is, the transaction or block data are divided into segments and transmitted in parallel multiple times over multiple channels. Finally, through the analysis and simulation of LECast in terms of energy consumption, latency, throughput, reliability, security, and coverage rate, the advantages of LECast were confirmed, which could meet the requirements of ELPCs and be well applied to UAV networks.
Unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-enabled intelligent transportation system (ITS) is an advanced technology that can provide various services including autonomous driving, real-time creation of high-definition maps, and car sharing. In particular, a UAV-enabled ITS can be realized through the combination of traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and UAVs that can act as flying roadside units (RSUs) at the outskirts and monitor road conditions from predefined locations to spot car accidents and any law violations. Notably, to realize these services, real-time communication between UAVs and RSUs must be guaranteed. However, UAVs have limited computing powers, and if extensive computation is required during communication, the provision of real-time ITS services may be hindered. Furthermore, UAVs and RSUs communicate via public channels that are prone to various attacks, such as replay, impersonation, trace, and session key disclosure attacks. Thus, in this article, a secure and lightweight authentication scheme is proposed for UAVs and RSUs using the blockchain technology. The proposed scheme is analyzed using informal and formal methods including Burrows–Abadi–Nikoogadam (BAN) logic, automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) simulation tool, and real–or–random (RoR) model, and its performance is compared with that of related schemes. The results reveal that the proposed scheme is more efficient and secure as compared to the other competing schemes.
Sana Hafeez, Ahsan Raza Khan, Mohammad Al-Quraan, Lina Mohjazi · 7 authors
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently established their capacity to provide cost-effective and credible solutions for various real-world scenarios. UAVs provide an immense variety of services due to their autonomy, mobility, adaptability, and communications interoperability. Despite the expansive use of UAVs to support ground communications, data exchanges in those networks are susceptible to security threats because most communication is through radio or Wi-Fi signals, which are easy to hack. While several techniques exist to protect against cyberattacks. Recently emerging technology blockchain could be one of promising ways to enhance data security and user privacy in peer-to-peer UAV networks. Borrowing the superiorities of blockchain, multiple entities can communicate securely, decentralized, and equitably. This article comprehensively overviews privacy and security integration in blockchain-assisted UAV communication. For this goal, we present a set of fundamental analyses and critical requirements that can help build privacy and security models for blockchain and help manage and support decentralized data storage systems. The UAV communication system's security requirements and objectives, including availability, authentication, authorization, confidentiality, integrity, privacy, and non-repudiation, are thoroughly examined to provide a deeper insight. We wrap up with a discussion of open research challenges, the constraints of current UAV standards, and potential future research directions.
Sur Singh Rawat, Youseef Alotaibi, Nitima Malsa, Vimal Gupta
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have revolutionized a wide range of industries, including monitoring, agriculture, surveillance, and supply chain. However, their widespread use also poses significant challenges, such as public safety, privacy, and cybersecurity. Cyberattacks, targeting UAVs have become more frequent, which highlights the need for robust security solutions. Blockchain technology, the foundation of cryptocurrencies has the potential to address these challenges. This study suggests a platform that utilizes blockchain technology to manage drone operations securely and confidentially. By incorporating blockchain technology, the proposed method aims to increase the security and privacy of drone data. The suggested platform stores information on a public blockchain located on Ethereum and leverages the Ganache platform to ensure secure and private blockchain transactions. The MetaMask wallet for Ethbalance is necessary for BCT transactions. The present research finding shows that the proposed approach’s efficiency and security features are superior to existing methods. This study contributes to the development of a secure and efficient system for managing drone operations that could have significant applications in various industries. The proposed platform’s security measures could mitigate privacy concerns, minimize cyber security risk, and enhance public safety, ultimately promoting the widespread adoption of UAVs. The results of the study demonstrate that the blockchain can ensure the fulfillment of core security needs such as authentication, privacy preservation, confidentiality, integrity, and access control.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), often referred to as drones, have the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry. They offer speed and accessibility in delivering medical supplies, making them the superior mode of transport for inaccessible and remote areas. Though drone-based systems are advantageous, there is a need for an end-to-end system that could provide a secure platform to use drones in a flawless manner to perform transactions. Drones are vulnerable to hacking and data interception, which may lead to the exfiltration of collected data by malicious users. In this study, MedUAV, a prototype for a drone-based decentralized autonomous emergency medicine supply system, is proposed. It leverages the security aspects of blockchain and smart contracts. The proposed system is deployed and tested in the Polygon Main network, and significant conclusions about the performance of the system are discussed.
Julio César Úbeda Ortega, Jesús Rodríguez-Molina, Margarita Martínez, Juan Garbajosa
Livestock monitoring often requires human supervision to guide farm animals to a specific point and the displacement of workers to the places where these animals are, which is likely to be several kilometers away, thus resulting in a repetitive task that requires a significant amount of time and demands the usage of land vehicles capable of moving swiftly through the countryside. In addition to that, data collection about animal behaviour with such procedures is often insufficient and cannot be shared in a secure enough manner. This paper describes how Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) tailored for this kind of task, when combined with other protocols and software technologies, can provide a useful to mitigate these issues. To prove this end, a functional prototype has been designed, built and tested, offering the operator accurate monitoring of farm facilities and animals. Additionally, security has been conceived as a cornerstone of the presented system from the very beginning. Not only the communication protocols used for this purpose have built-in security layers, but also InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and blockchain have been used as the technologies that enhance data storage among peers in a network.
Abdullah Ayub Khan, Asif Ali Laghari, Muhammad Shafiq, Shafique Ahmed Awan · 5 authors
Due to globalization and advances in network technology, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) with edge computing has gained increasingly more attention over the last few years. The technology provides a new paradigm to design interconnected distributed nodes in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted vehicle networks for communications between vehicles in smart cities. The process hierarchy of the current UAV-assisted networks is also becoming more multifaceted as more vehicles are connected, requiring accessing and exchanging information, performing tasks, and updating information securely. This poses serious issues and limitations to centralized UAV-assisted vehicle networks, directly affecting computing-intensive tasks and data offloading. This paper bridges these gaps by providing a novel, transparent, and secure lifecycle for UAV-assisted distributed vehicle communication using blockchain hyperledger technology. A modular infrastructure for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) is designed and ‘B-UV2X’, a blockchain hyperledger fabric-enabled distributed permissioned network-based consortium structure, is proposed. The participating nodes of the vehicle are interconnected with others in the chain of smart cities and exchange different information such as movement, etc., preserving operational logs on the blockchain-enabled immutable ledger. This automates IoV transactions over the proposed UAV-assisted vehicle-enabled consortium network with doppler spread. Thus, for this purpose, there are four different chain codes that are designed and deployed for IoV registration, adding new transactions, updating the ledger, monitoring resource management, and customized multi-consensus of proof-of-work. For lightweight IoV authentication, B-UV2X uses a two-way verification method with the defined hyperledger fabric consensus mechanism. Transaction protection from acquisition to deliverance and storage uses the NuCypher threshold proxy re-encryption mechanism. Simulation results for the proposed B-UV2X show a reduction in network consumption by 12.17% compared to a centralized network system, an increase in security features of up to 9.76%, and a reduction of 7.93% in the computational load for computed log storage.
With the rapid technological development of robust and intelligent UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), typically referred to as drones, much opportunities have emerged to provide DraaS (Drone-as-a-Service) to help industries such as agriculture, energy and utilities, GIS, package delivery, cinematography, industrial inspection and many more. The capability of drones to lift payload, acquire data with camera and sensors mounted on it make drones as a useful tool for various commercial applications. However, there exist great challenges for executing autonomous missions, operations, management, ensuring safety and secure communications. In this research paper, we review the latest research in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain applied for DraaS. Blockchain being a distributed ledger protects the shared data using cryptography techniques such as hash functions and public key encryption. It can also be used for assuring the truthfulness of the information stored and for improving the security and transparency of the UAVs. The integration of AI contributes more intelligence to the system enabling informed decision making and eventually converting drones into vehicles capable of executing autonomous missions in the real-world.
Sana Hafeez, Mahmoud A. Shawky, Mohammad Al-Quraan, Lina Mohjazi · 6 authors
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), an emerging architecture that embodies flying ad-hoc networks, face critical privacy and security challenges, mainly when engaged in data-sensitive missions. Therefore, message authentication is a crucial security feature for drone communication. This paper presents a Blockchain-based Efficient, and Trusted Authentication scheme for UAV communication BETA-UAV, which exploits the inherent properties of blockchain technology concerning memorability and immutable to record communication sessions via transaction using a smart contract. The smart contract in BETA-UAV allows participants to publish and call transactions from the blockchain network. Furthermore, the transaction addresses are proof of freshness and trustworthiness for subsequent transmissions. Furthermore, we investigate the ability to resist active attacks, e.g., impersonation, replaying, and modification. In addition, we evaluate the gas costs associated with the smart contract's functions by implementing BETA-UAV on the Ethereum public blockchain. Comparing computation and communication over-heads shows that the proposed approach can save significant costs over traditional techniques.
In a space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN), managing resources for the growing number of highly-dynamic and heterogeneous radios is a challenging task. Symbiotic communication (SC) is a novel paradigm, which leverages the analogy of the natural ecosystem in biology to create a radio ecosystem in wireless networks that achieves cooperative service exchange and resource sharing, i.e., service/resource trading, among numerous radios. As a result, the potential of symbiotic communication can be exploited to enhance resource management in SAGIN. Despite the fact that different radio resource bottlenecks can complement each other via symbiotic relationships, unreliable information sharing among heterogeneous radios and multi-dimensional resources managing under diverse service requests impose critical challenges on trusted trading and intelligent decision-making. In this article, we propose a secure and smart symbiotic SAGIN (S^4) framework by using blockchain for ensuring trusted trading among heterogeneous radios and machine learning (ML) for guiding complex service/resource trading. A case study demonstrates that our proposed S^4 framework provides better service with rational resource management when compared with existing schemes. Finally, we discuss several potential research directions for future symbiotic SAGIN.
Several advanced features exist in fifth-generation (5G) correspondence than in fourth-generation (4G) correspondence. Centric cloud-computing architecture achieves resource sharing and effectively handles big data explosion. For data security problems, researchers had developed many methods to protect data against cyber-attacks. Only a few solutions are based on blockchain (BC), but are affected by expensive storage costs, network latency, confidence, and capacity. Things are represented in digital form in the virtual cyberspace which is the major responsibility of the communication model based on cybertwin. A novel cybertwin-based UAV 6G network architecture is proposed with new concepts such as cloud operators and cybertwin in UAV. Here, IoE applications have to be energy aware and provide scalability with less latency. A novel Compute first networking (CFN) framework named secure blockchain-based UAV communication (BC-UAV) is designed which offers network services such as computing, caching, and communication resources. The focus of the blockchain was to improve the security in the cloud using hashing technique. Edge clouds support core clouds to quickly respond to user requests.