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.
Mobile edge computing is becoming a major trend in providing computation capacities at the edge of mobile networks. Meanwhile, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been considered as distinctly important integrated components to extend services coverage. In order to provide users with higher and satisfied quality of services, edge computing resources need to be allocated between edge computing stations (ECSs) and UAVs in mobile networks. However, there are significant security and privacy problems due to the open environments of ECSs and UAVs. In this paper, we propose a resource pricing and trading scheme based on Stackelberg dynamic game to optimally allocate edge computing resources between ECSs and UAVs, and blockchain technology is applied to record the entire resources trading process to protect the security and privacy. The ECSs control the resources price of the allocated edge computing resources, where the UAVs follow the price announced by the ECSs and make optimal decisions on the edge computing resources demands. Blockchain is integrated in the resource trading process to ensure the security and privacy. Numerical simulations are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
During this last decade, the blockchain (BC) paradigm has been required in several use cases and scenarios in particular for security, privacy, and trust provisioning. Accordingly, several studies proposed the use of BC technology to secure and to assure the trustworthiness of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this context, this chapter highlights several applications and scenarios for the deployment of UAVs within diverse smart systems. In addition, it illustrates the advantages of the integration of the BC within UAVs-based smart systems. This integration reveals new challenges and future research directions that are discussed in this chapter.
An unmanned aerial vehicle ad hoc network (UAANET) is an information sensing, analyzing, and transmitting network formed by multiple coordinated and collaborating UAVs. It is an emerging networking technology with a broad market prospect, but faces the problems of high dynamic topology and lack of trust. To address these issues, this article proposes a blockchain-em-powered trusted networking framework for UAANET, as well as the corresponding network architecture, protocol stack, key control signaling, and algorithms. To be more specific, blockchain is designed as a layer of distributed peer-to-peer security running on top of the physical UAANET. Three types of control signaling are designed, namely HELLO packet, topology control packet, and consensus packet. A max-min stable routing algorithm with three-dimensional link duration and a multipoint-relay-driven delegated Byzantine fault tolerance consensus mechanism are proposed for trusted networking of UAANET. The involved technical background and challenges are also detailed. These works together provide good references for scale deployment of UAANET in the near future.
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.
5G and beyond (B5G) networks significantly promote the popularity and ubiquity of drones by providing high-throughput and low-latency communication. In B5G drone networks, data sharing among drones has great potential to improve and enrich civilian and commercial applications, such as surveillance monitoring. Nevertheless, a series of security challenges arise such as data privacy leakage due to the lack of reliable centralized supervision. In this article, we employ the permissioned blockchain technology to propose a decentralized data management system. The permissioned blockchain deployed at pre-selected ground base stations is particularly suitable and practical for ensuring efficient peer-to-peer data sharing in B5G drone networks. However, the ground base stations working as miners are widely deployed without strong security protection, which may be compromised to produce maliciously manipulated results during the block verification in the permissioned blockchain. Hence, the miner selection is crucial for the permissioned blockchain-based B5G drone networks. We therefore introduce credit as a metric and propose a secure credit-based miner selection scheme using a four-weight subjective logic model. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed schemes are effective for secure data sharing in permissioned blockchain-based B5G drone networks.
Shuyun Luo, Hang Li, Zhenyu Wen, Bin Qian · 8 authors
An increasing number of cloud providers now offer mobile edge computing (MEC) services for their customers to support task offloading. This is undertaken to reduce latency associated with forwarding data from IoT devices owned by customers to cloud platforms. However, two challenges remain in existing MEC scenarios: (i) the coverage of MEC services is limited; (ii) there is limited ability to develop an audit trail about which MEC service providers have processed a user's data. A new architecture for automatically offloading user tasks in MEC scenarios is proposed that addresses the two challenges above. The architecture makes use of drones to dynamically cache data generated from IoT devices and forward this data to MEC servers that participate in a private blockchain network. Our simulated experiments demonstrate the flexibility of the task offloading process through the proposed architecture, which can provide greater visibility of MEC service providers involved in processing users' data.
Abdu Gumaei, Mabrook Al‐Rakhami, Mohammad Mehedi Hassan, Pasquale Pace · 7 authors
Nowadays, drones are not just deployed for defense and military establishments, but they are widely used in many applications such as natural disaster monitoring, soil and crop analysis, road and traffic surveillance, and consumer product delivery. Some information, such as drone identification and flight modes, can be transmitted to other drones. This information can be shared between drones by using radio frequency (RF) signals and through 5G networks. Recently, few studies have been proposed to use deep neural networks (DNNs) on RF signals for identifying drones and detecting their flight modes, such as off, on and connected, flying, hovering, and video recording. However, transmitting RF signals between drones and 5G nodes needs to be secure and decentralized; in addition, the performance of identification and detection needs to be more accurate. In this article, we introduce a framework that combines a blockchain with a deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) and edge computing for 5G-enabled drone identification and flight mode detection. In the proposed framework, raw RF signals of different drones under several flight modes are remotely sensed and collected on a cloud server to train a DRNN model and then distribute the trained model on edge devices for detecting drones and their flight modes. Blockchain is used in the proposed framework for data integrity and securing data transmission. The DRNN model is evaluated on a public dataset, called DroneRF. Experimental evaluation results show that the DRNN model of the proposed framework can detect drones and their flight modes from real RF signals with high accuracy as compared to recent related work.
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.
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has developed rapidly and has been widely used in military operations, medical rescue, environmental monitoring, and so on. UAV networks are an important foundation for large-scale UAV collaborative work. Traditional mobile self-or-ganizing network technology is too complicated to be quickly constructed and dynamically adjusted according to application requirements. In this article, we propose a new type of UAV network based on SDN architecture and blockchain technology, which is named SUV. By using blockchain technology, SUV implements a logically centralized but physically distributed control plane, which is responsible for the routing calculation and configuration management of the UAV network. SUV can quickly build UAV networks according to the application requirements and communication environment. It has features such as flexibility, survivability, security, and programmability, and is suitable for 5G-oriented UAV networking.
In recent years, there has been growing popularity of applying drones for medical services. Such applications always involve flying safety, data transmission, and personal privacy; therefore, reliable communication and enhanced information security should be addressed first. The 5G cellular network and blockchain technology emerge as promising candidates for solving these problems. This article first categorizes the medical applications of drones, and then presents some key challenges in these applications. Then we give preliminaries of 5G and blockchain, and explore their intrinsic characteristics to provide reliable communication and enhanced information security. In the scenario of disaster relief, an illustrative example is presented and discussed. Analytical results demonstrate the great potential of using 5G and blockchain for promoting the medical applications of drones.
Chen Wang, Jian Shen, Pandi Vijayakumar, Brij B. Gupta
With global economic integration, transnational trade plays an important role, and maritime transportation is one of the important means of freight transportation. It is of great significance to build a secure and efficient maritime transportation system (MTS). The introduction of Internet of things technology makes MTS more perfect. The IoT-enabled MTS is composed of marine terminals and on-board sensors, land-based data centers and base stations, as well as satellite networks. Many researchers have carried out significant work to aggregate data in MTS. However, because the terrestrial base stations cannot cover most of the sea area, the isolated maritime terminals, those who drive to the area without base station coverage, need the assistance of satellite networks to complete the contact with the data center. In this paper, we propose an attribute based secure data aggregation scheme for isolated IoT-enabled MTS. In the novel scheme, the constant attributes of a maritime terminal are utilized to generate its certification. In addition, on-board sensors are introduced in the system to help aggregate the status and surrounding environment of the maritime terminal. These monitoring data are encrypted by the sensors and transmitted to the data center for the trustworthiness evaluation of the isolated maritime terminal. Besides, the zero-knowledge proof is utilized to confirm the legitimacy of participating users. What's more, the security analysis and the simulation results show that the novel scheme is secure and efficient for IoT-enabled MTS.
Intelligent UAV-based monitoring systems are becoming an essential apparatus for crowd monitoring as they have proven to be viable and cost-effective solutions. Applications of such systems may include detecting antisocial and abnormal behavior among a crowd to ensure public safety and security, especially during periods of pandemic or social unrest when technology is aimed at replacing the human factor to ensure scalability and reduce risk. On the other hand, the modern architectures of autonomous UAV-based systems requires processing the captured information at the edge and cloud facilities, which requires transmission and/or retransmission of the captured data. This vulnerability of data security during transmission may compromise the benefits of the technology. Therefore, there is need for an effective strategy to achieve a secure architecture that takes into consideration the limited computing capabilities onboard the UAV agents and the distributed nature of the system. Blockchain, as a distributed network technology, will provide a safe, transparent, and efficient network system for UAV systems. Therefore, this article proposes a drone-swarm-aided distributed monitoring system in a blockchain-powered network. In the proposed monitoring mechanism, the security protocol and encryption algorithm are applied to ensure the security of each stage of the system, so as to realize the cooperative drone swarm to reliably perform monitoring tasks. The blockchain technology is introduced to achieve tamper-proof monitoring log recording and support group decision making of monitoring transactions.
Shubhani Aggarwal, Neeraj Kumar, Musaed Alhussein, Ghulam Muhammad
The Internet of Things (IoT) provides billions of Internet-enabled devices connections across the globe. In the IoT era, the healthcare industry has grown up from Healthcare 1.0 to Healthcare 4.0. As in Healthcare 3.0, patients visit hospital for their regular checkups, which increases the overall expenditure on medical treatment. However, with the recent technological advancements such as UAVs and blockchain, healthcare problems are solved with minimum payments and security of shared medical data. Motivated by these facts, this article provides blockchain-based UAV path planning to provide privacy-preservation in Healthcare 4.0. We propose a three-layered architecture for real-time collection, processing, and transmission of medical data. The proposed architecture provides a distributed platform for UAVs that ensures security and privacy for the transfer of medical data from one location to another with the proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanism. The simulation results show that the proposed model provides an effective solution for reliable data transmission and privacy-preserving sensitive healthcare information against potential threats. The comparative analysis also demonstrates the performance improvements in sharing medical data with patients and doctors. In summary, this article provides insights into the end users for the use of blockchain with UAVs in Healthcare 4.0 for future research directions.
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.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is recognized as one of the best sensing tools for gathering data in the industrial Internet of things sector. Besides, the flying ad hoc network (FANET) with multiple drones shows significant advantages in complicated task performing of large area. However, as an important part of communication security, key management for FANET currently depends heavily on the base station or infrastructures, which may easily become the attack target or increase the communication overheads of drones. Therefore, we propose a blockchain-based distributed key management scheme for heterogeneous FANET in this article, based on which drones can autonomously distribute cluster keys, update their public/private key pairs, migrate between clusters, and revoke malicious UAVs in a secure way. Security analysis and performance evaluation prove that our scheme can resist against a variety of external and internal attacks, and guarantee lightweight energy consumption for ordinary drones in the network.
In the current fifth-generation (5G) and Beyond 5G (B5G) era, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been playing a vital role and attracting interest in different application areas in the military, and civil applications such as communications, disaster management, search and rescue, security, control, agriculture, Internet of things (IoT), etc. In these networks, ultra-heterogeneous IoT devices generate time-sensitive traffic. However, those devices have limited resources to compute tasks. Recently, Mobile Edge Computation Offloading (MECO) has been considered as an encouraging model to enable the computation tasks of IoT devices to be performed by MEC servers and support ultra-low latency IoT applications to ensure Quality of services (QoS). However, terrestrial network failure due to natural and human-made disasters has been increasing, and difficult to provide reliable computation offloading and resource allocation services to IoT networks. Nowadays, UAVs have been promising technology to quickly deploy and recover the system to provide efficient services to edge nodes. The offloading and resource allocation problems in current network technology are complex, and offloading task to edge server is vulnerable to security risks. Hence, we utilize a deep reinforcement learning method to handle a complex problem for computation offloading and resource allocations in a dynamic environment. And also, we explore a blockchain-based multi-UAV-assisted MEC architecture in securing and optimizing the offloading problems.
Abstract Nowadays, the exponential increase in the usage of drones in various realms of societal and military applications necessitates advancements and stability in drone communication. Drones have proven their potential in providing real‐time cost‐efficient solutions for several applications like healthcare, smart grid surveillance, smart city monitoring, and border surveillance. Though it has many security and privacy issues, researchers across the globe have given numerous solutions to protect drone communication from cyber‐attacks. Most of these solutions were based on cryptographic techniques and are highly compute extensive. There exist few blockchain‐based solutions, which suffer from high transaction storage costs with communication reliability, latency, and bandwidth issues. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey to secure drone communication and propose a blockchain‐based secure and intelligent drone communication architecture underlying 5G communication network and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The proposed architecture uses an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as a platform for data storage, which ensures improved network performance, communication security and privacy, and reduces transaction storage cost. Further, it facilitates efficient drone communication in providing dynamic, flexible, and on‐the‐fly decisions competencies through 5G and AI technologies. Then, we incorporate a healthcare‐based case study using the proposed architecture. At last, future research challenges and directions are emphasized for improvement in this research area.
Li Jiang, Bin Chen, Shengli Xie, Sabita Maharjan · 5 authors
In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, UAVs-assisted wireless power transfer is a promising approach to charge low-power smart devices for energy replenishment. However, security and privacy concerns associated with the energy micro-transactions in untrusted wireless trading environment present serious challenges. In this paper, we exploit Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and consortium blockchain to propose a new distributed and secure UAVs-assisted wireless power transfer framework named aerial-ground chain, where heterogeneous consensus is developed to verify the energy micro-transactions. Specifically, the UAVs verify energy micro-transactions simultaneously but asynchronously to form an aerial tangle. The smart devices also participate in maintaining the aerial tangle. We define timeout for the energy micro-transactions, and leverage a set of Access Points (APs) to cooperatively confirm the timeout energy micro-transaction by utilizing consortium blockchain, to form a ground main chain. Furthermore, a contract theory based resource cooperation scheme is designed to motivate the UAVs to participate in wireless power transfer, and to incentivize the APs to contribute their resources in cooperatively verifying the timeout energy micro-transactions. Security analysis and numerical results illustrate that the developed aerial-ground chain and the designed contract theory based resource cooperation scheme are secure and efficient for UAVs-assisted wireless power transfer.
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.