Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communications have recently entered a new period of interest, motivated by technological advances and the gradual emergence of the Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network (SAGIN). The current survey aims to capture the use of UAVs in the SAGIN while highlighting the most promising open research topics. The traditional UAV network architecture is not adequate to meet the challenges presented by the SAGIN, and an effective and secure space-air-ground integrated UAV network needs to be constructed. Given its well-distributed management and consensus mechanism, blockchain technology can make up for the deficiency of the traditional UAV network. In this work, we review the role of UAVs in the SAGIN. Then, three applications of the blockchain-envisioned UAV network are introduced through several classifications. Future challenges and the corresponding open research topics are also described.
Abdullah Ayub Khan, Zaffar Ahmed Shaikh, Asif Ali Laghari, Sami Bourouis · 6 authors
In this paper, we propose a secure blockchain-aware framework for distributed data management and monitoring. Indeed, images-based data are captured through drones and transmitted to the fog nodes. The main objective here is to enable process and schedule, to investigate individual captured entity (records) and to analyze changes in the blockchain storage with a secure hash-encrypted (SH-256) consortium peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The proposed blockchain mechanism is also investigated for analyzing the fog-cloud-based stored information, which is referred to as smart contracts. These contracts are designed and deployed to automate the overall distributed monitoring system. They include the registration of UAVs (drones), the day-to-day dynamic captured drone-based images, and the update transactions in the immutable storage for future investigations. The simulation results show the merit of our framework. Indeed, through extensive experiments, the developed system provides good performances regarding monitoring and management tasks.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining immense attention due to their potential to revolutionize various businesses and industries. However, the adoption of UAV-assisted applications will strongly rely on the provision of reliable systems that allow managing UAV operations at high levels of safety and security. Recently, the concept of UAV traffic management (UTM) has been introduced to support safe, efficient, and fair access to low-altitude airspace for commercial UAVs. A UTM system identifies multiple cooperating parties with different roles and levels of authority to provide real-time services to airspace users. However, current UTM systems are centralized and lack a clear definition of protocols that govern a secure interaction between authorities, service providers, and end-users. The lack of such protocols renders the UTM system unscalable and prone to various cyber attacks. Another limitation of the currently proposed UTM architecture is the absence of an efficient mechanism to enforce airspace rules and regulations. To address this issue, we propose a decentralized UTM protocol that controls access to airspace while ensuring high levels of integrity, availability, and confidentiality of airspace operations. To achieve this, we exploit key features of the blockchain and smart contract technologies. In addition, we employ a mobile crowdsensing (MCS) mechanism to seamlessly enforce airspace rules and regulations that govern the UAV operations. The solution is implemented on top of the Etheruem platform and verified using four different smart contract verification tools. We also provided a security and cost analysis of our solution. For reproducibility, we made our implementation publicly available on Github.
The integration of air and ground smart vehicles is becoming a new paradigm of future transportation. A decent number of smart unmanned vehicles or UAS will be sharing the national airspace for various purposes, such as express delivery, surveillance, etc. However, the proliferation of UAS also brings challenges considering the safe integration of them into the current Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems. Especially when the current Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcasting (ADS-B) systems do not have message authentication mechanisms, it can not distinguish whether an authorized UAS is using the corresponding airspace. In this paper, we aim to address these practical challenges in two folds. We first use blockchain to provide a secure authentication platform for flight plan approval and sharing between the existing ATM facilities. We then use the fountain code to encode the authentication payloads and adapt them into the de facto communication protocol of ATM. This maintains backward compatibility and ensures the verification success rate under the noisy broadcasting channel. We simulate the realistic wireless communication scenarios and theoretically prove that our proposed authentication framework is with low latency and highly compatible with existing ATM communication protocols.
M. Satheesh Kumar, S. Vimal, N. Z. Jhanjhi, Shanmuga Sundar Dhanabalan · 5 authors
With the prevalence of Aerospace Technologies, the regulations of cybersecurity are becoming smarter, assured, and long-lasting. Modern communication network technologies have enormous growth in the cyber threats and masquerading attacks to steal data. Hence concepts and mechanisms are built and made into regulations for a safer environment. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), often known as drones, are becoming increasingly common, posing new problems in areas such as monitoring, agriculture, weather prediction, surveillance and other fields. This includes a large number of devices that, owing to a lack of energy or a system shutdown, might occasionally send incorrect signals and must be monitored autonomously by drones in remote regions. In this paper, we propose a energy intensive blockchain-based platform for controlling drone operations while ensuring trust and security for all parties involved. The goal of this paper is to explore the extent of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) vulnerability to deceptive (Global Navigation Satellite System) GNSS signals by establishing the necessary conditions for UAV via GPS (Global Positioning System) spoofing. The existing algorithms used to mitigate spoofing attacks have unbounded long-term errors, which increase in time during its performance. An innovative idea is necessitating to eliminate those errors, thereby in the proposed work, Ethereum Blockchain has been implemented to create a blockchain network to mitigate the spoofing attacks. Blockchains are incredibly popular nowadays and is the basic technology for cryptocurrencies. Blockchain technology greatly impacts the applications in UAVs. The proposed methodology uses the network that has to be registered in the aerospace components through the ledger associated with relevant data communication in the Blockchain. When an intruder gets acquired with the data in the network with a single block, it cannot affect the entire network due to the data integrity in the ledgers that has been cryptographically assigned. The blockchain network intermittently verifies the geolocation data so that any outlying data would be detected and eliminated quickly. The data that has been verified is made available for the view of aviation and spacecraft operations through the distributed network. The proposed methodology outperforms the existing methods in intense drift error and, in the case of confidentiality and integrity, it has very low risk when compared to existing methods.
With the development in information and communications technology (ICT) and drones such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), edge computing, image processing, and autonomous drones, solutions supporting search and rescue (SAR) missions can be developed with more intelligent capabilities. In most of the drone and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based systems supporting SAR missions, several drones deployed in different areas acquire images and videos that are sent to a ground control station (GCS) for processing and detecting a missing person. Although this offers many advantages, such as easy management and deployment, the approach still has many limitations. For example, when a connection between a drone and a GCS has some problems, the quality of service cannot be maintained. Many drone and UAV-based systems do not support flexibility, transparency, security, and traceability. In this paper, we propose a novel Internet-of-Drones (IoD) architecture using blockchain technology. We implement the proposed architecture with different drones, edge servers, and a Hyperledger blockchain network. The proof-of-concept design demonstrates that the proposed architecture can offer high-level services such as prolonging the operating time of a drone, improving the capability of detecting humans accurately, and a high level of transparency, traceability, and security.
Mário Gabriel Santos De Campos, Caroline Ponzoni Carvalho Chanel, Corentin Chauffaut, Jérôme Lacan
This study describes a blockchain-based multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (multi-UAV) surveillance framework that enables UAV coordination and financial exchange between system users. The objective of the system is to allow a set of Points-Of-Interest (POI) to be surveyed by a set of autonomous UAVs that cooperate to minimize the time between successive visits while exhibiting unpredictable behavior to prevent external agents from learning their movements. The system can be seen as a marketplace where the UAVs are the service providers and the POIs are the service seekers. This concept is based on a blockchain embedded on the UAVs and on some nodes on the ground, which has two main functionalities. The first one is to plan the route of each UAV through an efficient and computationally cheap game-theoretic decision algorithm implemented into a smart contract. The second one is to allow financial transactions between the system and its users, where the POIs subscribe to surveillance services by buying tokens. Conversely, the system pays the UAVs in tokens for the provided services. The first benchmarking experiments show that the IOTA blockchain is a potential blockchain candidate to be integrated in the UAV embedded system and that the chosen decentralized decision-making coordination strategy is efficient enough to fill the mission requirements while being computationally light.
In this research work and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that uses blockchain methodology to collect health data from the users and saves it on a server nearby is introduced. In this paper the UAV communicates with the body sensor hives (BSH) through a low-power secure manner. This process is established using a token with which the UAV establishes relationship with the BSH. The UAV decrypts the retrieved HD with the help of of the shared key, creating a two-phase authentication mechanism. When verified, the HT is transmitted to a server nearby in a safe manner using blockchain. The proposed healthcare methodology is analysed to determine its feasibility. Simulation and implementation is executed and a performance of the work is observed. Analysis indicates that the proposed work provides good assistance in a secure environment.
Chengzu Dong, Frank Jiang, Xuejun Li, Aiting Yao · 6 authors
Edge computing is becoming more and more popular in both academics and industries. With the booming of edge computing technology, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based delivery system is expected to achieve higher efficiency and low latency. However, the UAV often collects user-specific data during the delivery process, the data-leakage or security/privacy breaching could occur during the data-sharing process between the edge nodes and UAV devices. Privacy-preserving issues are further refraining from the popularity of the UAV-based logistic systems. It is believed that the UAV tracking and identity verification system can provide imminent access-level security and privacy protection, which is urgently required to eliminate the practical concerns under the edge computing-based environment. To the best knowledge of authors, for the first time, this paper proposes a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) integrated framework with the latest Blockchain technology for UAV-based delivery system. It is expected to protect the edge computing-based UAV delivery system against security flaws and privacy concerns. In this work, the benefits of using SSI with Blockchain technology are analyzed, the efficiency of identifying and authenticating UAVs and their respective users is further experimented and discussed. The experimental results show that the integrated SSI framework with Blockchain can effectively improve the efficiency of the user identity management system as well as the identity verification process in the delivery process.
Abstract With the considerable exploration of unmanned aerial vehicles in civilian and military fields, the data storage and transmission mechanism of unmanned aerial vehicles exhibit significant security limitations, which cannot meet the strict requirements for data security in civilian and military business scenarios. In recent years, blockchain technology has been tried to be applied to multiple fields. The features of blockchain includes decentralization, immutability, transparency and auditability, make transactions more secure and tamper proof. In view of the many excellent features of blockchain, in this paper, blockchain technology is introduced into the application of cluster of unmanned aerial vehicles, aiming to solve the problems of identity authentication, secure and reliable transmission of data between unmanned aerial vehicles, and access control of the data on the blockchain, thereby to enhance the security of the cluster of unmanned aerial vehicles and to ensure the integrity and security of data.
Abstract From the past few years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has proved an immense potential in providing the cost and time‐efficient solutions to the various societal applications such as healthcare, supply chain, and video & surveillance. It has many data security and privacy issues, and researchers across the globe have given many solutions to protect data from cyber‐attacks. Many of them have suggested cryptographic‐based solutions, which is very compute extensive. Very few researchers have suggested Blockchain (BC)‐based solutions, but their solutions may suffer from high data storage cost as well as network latency, reliability, and bandwidth issues. To overcome the above‐mentioned issues, this paper proposed an InterPlanetary File System and BC‐based secure UAV communication scheme over the 6G network. This proposed scheme ensures data security and privacy, reduces data storage cost, and enhances network performance. Then, the research challenges and future directions for further improvement of the proposed system have been presented.
Tao Han, Igor de L. Ribeiro, Naércio Magaia, Joao Preto · 8 authors
Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, are receiving growing research interest due to their ability to carry a multitude of sensors and to connect to mobile networks. They are also able to move freely across the air, which enables the creation of numerous applications that were until now considered impracticable. However, such applications may require high computational resources, reliable connection, and high data transmission rates to accomplish different tasks. Therefore, in this work, first, we discuss 5G communication networks and mobile edge computing (MEC) as promising technologies that can provide several benefits to drone-enabled environments and solve some of the presented issues. We also comment on 5G and MEC approaches, presenting the state of the art and seeking to solve each of the latter issues presented. Afterward, we introduce new security concerns of drone communication networks, given their recent popularity. These concerns are related to the possibility of malicious users taking advantage of this brand new technology, which has made many governments ban drones due to public safety. Next, blockchain technology is brought in as a novel solution to the security issues due to its decentralized nature, making it inherently safe. This article also surveys contributions that make use of each of the technologies mentioned to improve the emerging drone industry. Subsequently, we discuss open issues and future perspectives.
The future mobile communication system is expected to provide ubiquitous connectivity and unprecedented services over billions of devices. The flying drone, also known as unmanned aerial vehicle, is prominent in its flexibility and low cost, and has emerged as a significant network entity to realize such ambitious targets. However, the distributed nature makes the operation of a large-scale drone network confront many challenges, such as vulnerability to security threats and privacy leakage. To address these problems, in this article, we propose to utilize the blockchain concept to the development of drone network. Under the proposed blockchain-empowered drone networks (BeDrone), drones that are deployed for service provisioning can act as the miners of blockchain, and acquire the computing resources from each other or an edge computing node whenever needed. Recommendations and future research directions for designing BeDrone are introduced with a focus on the game theoretic incentive mechanism for resource allocation and acquisition. Performance evaluations are conducted to illustrate the benefits of the proposed architecture on developing blockchain-envisioned drones.
Mohammad Saidur Rahman, Ibrahim Khalil, Mohammed Atiquzzaman
Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, can be used for commercial services such as short-distance delivery. In order to ensure quality services, multiple drone-based delivery service providers can be employed in delivery service systems. In this article, we address two very important and unexplored challenges of employing drones in delivery services. First, involving multiple drones from different service providers elevates the chance of collision during flights. Second, drones may hamper the privacy of citizens by unauthorized access to private and restricted areas. In order to solve the aforementioned issues, we propose a blockchain-based policy enforcement mechanism in the drone-based delivery service systems. At first, the mechanism will set policies to establish pre-allocated flight paths for different drones at different times to avoid collisions, and ensure the privacy of citizens by restricting their access to unauthorized areas. Later, the blockchain will enforce the policies to monitor compliance of the drone flights and identify non-compliant drone services to penalize corresponding service providers. We simulate a virtual drone-based delivery system with the Ethereum blockchain platform and examine the performance and feasibility of our proposed mechanism.
Andrea Tesei, Domenico Lattuca, Alexandr Tardo, Luca Di Mauro · 8 authors
Major maritime carriers are globally demanding improvements in the efficiency of port operations. Cargo carried by ships must be loaded and unloaded quickly with minimal stopover time in the port. This requirement mandates seaports to deploy cutting-edge technology to the port area so that logistic processes are increasingly efficient and reliable. In this scenario, the attack surface of such critical infrastructure is growing very rapidly and advanced security techniques must be deployed to enforce a high attack resilience. A Distributed Ledger-based Credential Management System exploiting a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to enable transparent and real-time tracking of logistic vehicles and cargos within a terminal is presented in this paper. Based on a customization of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) security standards, the proposed scheme provides authentication, authorization, and revocation capabilities to promptly exclude misbehaving logistic vehicles from the system, while maintaining an immutable record of all the logistic vehicles' activity. The laboratory validation demonstrates that the delay of the devised scheme is not dependent on the quay area capacity, thus being applicable in seaports of any size. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the solution is demonstrated with the field trial results obtained with the EU Horizon 2020 COREALIS project testbed deployed in the Port of Livorno.
Summary The “last mile” problem in logistics is challenging due to its low efficiency and high cost. To address this problem, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) delivery such as drone delivery has been proposed and widely accepted as a promising solution. However, currently most of the existing UAV delivery systems are based on Cloud Computing which cannot efficiently meet the requirements of many real‐time services in UAV delivery systems. Meanwhile, the security issues in UAV delivery systems also raise critical concerns due to the existence of multiple participants (such as the sender, middler, and receiver) who may not maintain a mutual trust relationship among them. How to secure the UAV delivery process in such an untrusted environment is still a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and blockchain‐based UAV delivery system to resolve the “last mile” problem in logistics. Specifically, based on the MEC architecture, the blockchain nodes are deployed on the edge nodes to facilitate and secure the UAV delivery process. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed solution, a MEC‐based UAV delivery system prototype with a private blockchain on the Ethereum platform is implemented. Through the security analysis and performance evaluation, it is proven that our proposed solution can effectively solve the “last mile” problem and address the security issues in UAV delivery systems.
COVID-19 made the world stop, with people trapped inside their homes and governments trying to restrict the public movement. However, to accomplish this, one big problem that emerged and outscored everything else was catering to the day to day necessary items of the people without human involvement. In this regard, we propose a blockchain-enabled secure communication framework for delivering the goods in COVID-19 like scenarios by leveraging the drones that are available with commercial retail providers. The blockchain scheme is used to create smart contracts to build the trust of buyers and sellers on the framework as the payments are made through the smart contract executions. The blockchain based order processing ensures the integrity and authenticity of the information. Moreover, a communication model is presented along with the order, delivery and payment phases. The results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by evaluating it based on gas price, transaction time, and mining time.
Yulei Wu, Hong‐Ning Dai, Hao Wang, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
5G-enabled drones have potential applications in a variety of both military and civilian settings (e.g., monitoring and tracking of individuals in demonstrations and/or enforcing of social / physical distancing during pandemics such as COVID-19). Such applications generally involve the collection and dissemination of (massive) data from the drones to remote data centres for storage and analysis, for example via 5G networks. Consequently, there are security and privacy considerations underpinning 5G-enabled drone communications. We posit the potential of leveraging blockchain to facilitate privacy preservation, and therefore in this article we will review existing blockchain-based solutions after introducing the architecture for 5G-enabled drone communications and blockchain. We will also review existing legislation and data privacy regulations that need to be considered in the design of blockchain-based solutions, as well as identifying potential challenges and open issues which will hopefully inform future research agenda.
Pramod Abichandani, Deepan Lobo, Smit Kabrawala, William A. McIntyre
Ethereum blockchain is a powerful, open-source technology for creating decentralized and secure information sharing systems. The main contribution of this article is the experimental validation of an Ethereum blockchain-based software and hardware architecture that enables secure communication for multiple small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs). The experiments involved three DJI M100 quadrotors that shared images captured during flight based on smart contracts created using Ethereum’s Turing complete programming language. The smart contract was designed so that only the intended recipient sUAV could access a specific image. The effect of image size, difficulty level, and consensus algorithms on image transfer times during flight are noted and point to the feasibility of this system in practical missions. The effects of wireless network disruptions on the Ethereum network are documented. The fully documented smart contract code is open sourced to assist readers in quick prototyping. As efforts for decentralization and security of multirobot systems continue to grow, the system architecture and implementation detailed here may serve as a guide for future research.
Moayad Aloqaily, Ouns Bouachir, Azzedine Boukerche, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi
Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are designed to meet various end-user quality of service (QoS) requirements through high data rates (typically of gigabits per second) and low latencies. Coupled with fog and mobile edge computing, 5G can achieve high data rates, enabling complex autonomous smart city services such as the large deployment of self-driving vehicles and large-scale artificial-intelligence-enabled industrial manufacturing. However, to meet the exponentially growing number of connected IoT devices and irregular data and service requests in both low- and high-density locations, the process of enacting traditional cells supported through fixed and costly base stations requires rethought to enable on-demand mobile access points in the form of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for diversified smart city scenarios. This article envisions a 5G network environment that is supported by blockchain-enabled UAVs to meet dynamic user demands with network access supply. The solution enables decentralized service delivery (drones as a service) and routing to and from end users in a reliable and secure manner. Both public and private blockchains are deployed within the UAVs, supported by fog and cloud computing devices and data centers to provide a wide range of complex authenticated service and data availability. Particular attention is paid to comparing data delivery success rates and message exchange in the proposed solution against traditional UAV-supported cellular networks. Challenges and future research are also discussed with highlights on emerging technologies such as federated learning.
Maninderpal Singh, Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Rasmeet Singh Bali
The Internet of Drones (IoD) is an environment, which facilitates the autonomous and hybrid (semi-autonomous) operations of drones. Due to this advantage, the drones have paved their way into every segment (almost) across the world. Whatever be the application (warfare, surveillance, photography, rescue, delivery, etc), the transmission of data (to and fro) occur between the drones and the other infrastructure over wireless channels. While on the move, this data (operational or service-related) is vulnerable to several security risks and attacks. Hence, the maintenance of the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of the data is the primary goal in the IoD environment. Recently, the blockchain, a distributed ledger-based technology is being popularly adapted to store the data immutably, making it a possible solution to handle the above-raised issues. But, there are several challenges with conventional blockchain architecture, which make it difficult to adapt it in its current form. Firstly, the blockchain works by building trust in the trust-less environment by using a consensus mechanism. Secondly, the blockchain inherently involves a large number of network communication operations to synchronize the peer-to-peer network. Even more, the bigger the blockchain grows, the more is the data flowing across the network and so does the challenges. Therefore, to overcome these problems, ODOB: One Drone One Block-based Lightweight Blockchain Architecture for IoD is proposed. ODOB decouples the data part (or block ledger) from the block header to form a distributed architecture. This architecture couple the drones with an individual amendable block (each drone can access only their own block), thereby making it simple, trustworthy, and lightweight. ODOB is evaluated for several parameters and the results obtained favor the proposed architecture.
Flying Ad Hoc networks, (FANETs) in recent years, have actively been used in monitoring landscape, military and mapping terrains. However, with the advent of the emerging concept of smart cities and new business applications, these flying devices and drones have found a new use case in the medical and governance sector. But these networks suffer from the major problem of centralization. Although centralization does provide reliability and efficiency but also poses the threat of a single point of failure. Meanwhile, blockchain widely known for its decentralization is heavily researched and can be utilized in this case to offer a solution to the problem of centralization of FANETs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a decentralized architecture of flying ad hoc nodes based on blockchain and using Practical byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) for consensus among nodes. By employing PBFT, the architecture is not only computationally efficient and fast. In addition, we have used a gossip protocol for passing messages among nodes. Lastly, we have simulated the working of our model and the experimental results show that the proposed method works with nearly constant throughput and latency while increasing the network size and approximately constant message overhead with increase transaction for given network size.
Amjad Saeed Khan, Gaojie Chen, Yogachandran Rahulamathavan, Gan Zheng · 6 authors
The UAV is emerging as one of the greatest technology developments for rapid network coverage provisioning at affordable cost. The aim of this paper is to outsource network coverage of a specific area according to a desired quality of service requirement and to enable various entities in the network to have intelligence to make autonomous decisions using blockchain and auction mechanisms. In this regard, by considering a multiple-UAV network where each UAV is associated to its own controlling operator, this paper addresses two major challenges: the selection of the UAV for the desired quality of network coverage and the development of a distributed and autonomous real-time monitoring framework for the enforcement of service level agreement (SLA). For a suitable UAV selection, we employ a reputation-based auction mechanism to model the interaction between the business agent who is interested in outsourcing the network coverage and the UAV operators serving in closeby areas. In addition, theoretical analysis is performed to show that the proposed auction mechanism attains a dominant strategy equilibrium. For the SLA enforcement and trust model, we propose a permissioned blockchain architecture considering Support Vector Machine (SVM) for real-time autonomous and distributed monitoring of UAV service. In particular, smart contract features of the blockchain are invoked for enforcing the SLA terms of payment and penalty, and for quantifying the UAV service reputation. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of theoretical analysis and efficacy of the proposed model.