Syed Faisal Abbas Shah, Tehseen Mazhar, Tamara Al Shloul, Tariq Shahzad · 7 authors
Real-time data gathering, analysis, and reaction are made possible by this information and communication technology system. Data storage is also made possible by it. This is a good move since it enhances the administration and operation services essential to any city's efficient operation. The idea behind "smart cities" is that information and communication technology (ICTs) need to be included in a city's routine activities in order to gather, analyze, and store enormous amounts of data in real-time. This is helpful since it makes managing and governing urban areas easier. The "drone" or "uncrewed aerial vehicle" (UAV), which can carry out activities that ordinarily call for a human driver, serves as an example of this. UAVs could be used to integrate geospatial data, manage traffic, keep an eye on objects, and help in an emergency as part of a smart urban fabric. This study looks at the benefits and drawbacks of deploying UAVs in the conception, development, and management of smart cities. This article describes the importance and advantages of deploying UAVs in designing, developing, and maintaining in smart cities. This article overviews UAV uses types, applications, and challenges. Furthermore, we presented blockchain approaches for addressing the given problems for UAVs in smart research topics and recommendations for improving the security and privacy of UAVs in smart cities. Furthermore, we presented Blockchain approaches for addressing the given problems for UAVs in smart cities. Researcher and graduate students are audience of our article.
Abstract The wide applications of the Internet of Drones (IoD), ranging from package delivery to surveillance, attract the attention of industrialists and academicians. Drones are given the task of obtaining sensitive field information within the flying zone in real‐time. Hence, it is important to tackle the privacy and security issues associated with drones that are employed in these kinds of situations. Also, when the drones move to the new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operator coverage area, the drones are required to execute the authentication process again, which affects the performance of IoD. To overcome the above‐said shortcomings, a physically secure and privacy‐preserving blockchain enabled authentication method is proposed in this paper. The blockchain network permits drones to perform quick re‐authentication by transferring drone authentication codes to the following UAV operators. In the proposed work, the drone does not need to store the secret keys to perform anonymous authentication, and it provides physical security for the drones. When compared to competing techniques, the proposed scheme delivers the needed security features while incurring lower storage, computational, and communication costs.
Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANET) is an emerging area of research due to its low cost, high coverage and fast transmission features. In these networks, the flying nodes are connected with ground stations and communicate wirelessly, especially when the networks are congested and complex. Due to mobility, and lack of predefined infrastructure, these networks have suffered from various security and trust issues. The traditional trust and security solutions are designed for ground networks and are not feasible for these networks. This paper proposes a trust and authentication model including Trust Establishment Mechanism for FANET (TEM-FANET) and authentication system by using Block-chain method. The trust is calculated to evaluate the node’s trust status and ensure the existence of the trustworthy nodes by using direct, indirect, and cumulative trust values. Whereas the authentication system is utilizing blockchain technology for nodes authentication and evaluate its feasibility. The proposed model is lightweight and able to monitor the node’s behavior and compute the trusted quality and broadcast the node status with neighbor nodes. The proposed model is also integrated with ground stations for record keeping and decision-making processes. The proposed model is evaluated in simulation with state-of-the-art trust solutions where the results show the better performance in terms of overhead, data delivery, node detection rate, and computational time.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as pivotal roles within internet of vehicles (IoV), serving as mobile base stations. However, while expanding coverage and improving mobility, the deployment of UAVs also poses a threat to the integrity and privacy of sensitive data due to open wireless communication channels in IoV. Therefore, preventing unauthorized access and data tampering is critically important between UAVs and vehicles. For the authenticity and legitimacy of the UAV certificate, existing authentication approaches may lead to significant challenges in key management overhead or dependence on a trusted third party. In this paper, a blockchain-based authentication scheme for UAV-assisted IoV system (BASUV) is proposed. This solution enables dependable UAV registration and authentication services, and permits the dynamic addition and removal. Specifically, blockchain is introduced to achieve the decentralized management and distributed trust of the UAV certificate ledger. Furthermore, to prevent information tampering and identity deception, we design CMPES, a novel combined scheme based on multiple public key generators (PKGs) for encryption and signature. Identical key pair in encryption and signature can reduce key generation and management overhead. The security and experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Hengchang Pan, Y. W. Wang, Wei Wang, Ping Cao · 6 authors
Efficient and trusted regulation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an essential but challenging issue in the future era of the Internet of Low-altitude Intelligence, due to the difficulties in UAVs’ identity recognition and location matching, potential for falsified information reporting, etc. To address this challenging issue, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based UAV location authentication scheme, which employs a distance bounding protocol to establish a location proof, ensuring the authenticity of UAV positions. To preserve the privacy of UAVs, anonymous certificates and zero-knowledge proof are used. The security of the proposed scheme is analyzed. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed scheme.
Due to its diverse and promising use cases, including civilian, military, and commercial, the Internet of Drones (IoD) has quickly become a hot issue in academic and industry circles. Concerns about drone privacy and security are also growing at the same rate. Drones from different flying zones frequently work together in the IoD to accomplish the same mission, necessitating the development of trust among untrusted domains. Recently, some researchers have used blockchain in their authentication scheme to establish trust across different domains. However, the integration led to significant communication, computation and storage overheads and the loss of crucial security features like anonymity or unlinkability. To address these concerns, we develop a cost-effective key exchange protocol for cross-domain IoD communications through the judicious use of the blockchain. Specifically, we employ Chebyshev's chaotic map as the crypto-system, and the ledger keeps only the public keys of the drones, resulting in a significant decrease in storage and computation overheads. The proposed protocol not only complies with the stringent Canetti and Krawczyk adversary model but also satisfies the essential security requirements for IoD, such as anonymity and unlinkability. Using informal justification, formal proof, and automated security reasoning in addition to a comparative performance evaluation, this research substantiates its claims.
Chengzu Dong, Shantanu Pal, Qi An, Aiting Yao · 11 authors
This paper presents a novel architecture that utilizes the Zero Trust Principle to facilitate blockchain-enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) delivery systems, emphasizing recipient privacy, verification, and continuous authentication. By integrating blockchain’s decentralization and transparency with a Zero Trust model, the architecture ensures robust security and access control. The blockchain-based architecture guarantees data integrity and resilience, while advanced cryptographic techniques, including homomorphic encryption, ensure long-term security. Ongoing security assessment and improvement are facilitated through the maturity model’s integration with blockchain technology. This innovative approach effectively mitigates cyber risks, safeguards recipient data privacy, it initiative promotes the secure and efficient use of UAVs in logistics. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining strict access controls and trust boundaries. Through adaptable security evaluations, the model addresses evolving threats, ensuring a secure environment for UAV integration into the modern supply chain while prioritizing recipient privacy and security.
This paper develops a cutting-edge multimodal federated learning framework, integrated with distributed ledger technologies, designed specifically for UAV delivery scenarios. The framework adopts various data modalities, including user pictures, behavior, and location, to dynamically optimize delivery routes and schedules, thus enhancing both user privacy and security of the delivery process. By employing federated learning, this framework allows data to be processed locally on individual devices, significantly enhancing both user privacy and data integrity. The integration of distributed ledger technology ensures that all updates to the federated model are not only immutable and traceable, but also secure. Through comprehensive evaluations, our framework shows outstanding improvements in both the efficiency and security of UAV deliveries. These findings show the transformative potential of our approach to establish user-centric, efficient, and secured UAV delivery systems.
Eranga Bandara, Sachin Shetty, Peter Foytik, Abdul Rahim Abdul Rahman · 7 authors
In recent years, the use of UAVs has expanded to various applications such as surveillance, disaster response, agriculture, and delivery. However, traditional UAV monitoring systems rely on direct communication between the UAV and the ground pilot, which has several limitations such as limited range, poor reliability, and susceptibility to interference. To overcome these limitations, there has been significant interest in integrating UAVs into cellular networks such as 5G/6G network slicing. The flexibility of network slicing allows UAVs to operate on different slices based on their communication needs, which can improve their performance and efficiency. However, integrating UAVs into network slicing also poses several challenges, such as managing communication and permissions of UAVs and base stations, access control of UAVs, and identity management of UAVs. To address these challenges, we propose a blockchain, Non-Fungible Token(NFT), Federated Learning(FL), and Zero-Trust(ZT) security-enabled UAV monitoring platform for 5G/6G network sliced environments. We propose a novel approach in which UAVs are represented as NFT tokens within the platform. This innovative representation allows for enhanced security and trust in the system, aligning with the principles of the Zero-Trust security model, which assumes no implicit trust in any network component or user. Furthermore, we propose a FL system that operates on top of the blockchain, which can analyze data from multiple UAVs across different network slices. Our proposed FL system uses coordinator-less models, which eliminates the attacks of a centralized coordinator. As a use case, we consider a scenario where our proposed system detects anomaly communications of UAVs and identifies attack surfaces via analyzing network traffic data of UAVs using FL. The 5G system testbed implemented with FreedomFi 5G gateway and Indoor Radio Cell.
Today, intelligent drone technology is rapidly expanding, particularly in the defense industry. A swarm of drones can communicate, share data, and make the best decisions on their own. Drone swarms can swiftly and effectively carry out missions like surveillance, reconnaissance, and rescue operations, without exposing military troops to hostile conditions. However, there are still significant problems that need to be resolved. One of them is to protect communications on these systems from threat actors. In this paper, we use blockchain technology as a defense mechanism against such issues. Drones can communicate data safely, without the need for a centralized authority (ground station), when using a blockchain to facilitate communication between them in a leader–follower hierarchy structure. Solidity has been used to create a compact, lightweight, and effective smart contract that automates the process of choosing a position in a certain swarm formation structure. Additionally, a mechanism for electing a new leader is proposed. The effectiveness of the presented model is assessed through a simulation that makes use of a DApp we created and Gazebo software. The purpose of this work is to develop a reliable and secure UAV swarm communication system that will enable widespread global adoption by numerous sectors.
Multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) form a UAV cluster, which relies on wireless communication networks to facilitate information interaction among the UAVs. UAV clusters offer enhanced efficiency and fault tolerance, making reliable computing services possible. Compared to terrestrial networks, UAV computing network presents several desirable features, including mobility, availability, and flexibility, affording the potential for seamless global coverage. However, due to the inherent openness of wireless communication networks, UAV computing networks are susceptible to various security attacks. Existing access control mechanisms for UAV computing networks predominantly rely on base stations or central servers. This reliance elevates communication overhead for UAVs and exposes them to potential attacks from adversaries. Therefore, we propose a blockchain-aided distributed secure access control scheme specifically tailored for UAV computing networks, enabling UAVs to autonomously manage and determine identity, attributes, and access policies. To address the communication complexity and scalability concerns associated with blockchains, we integrate committee elections and clustering optimizations into the scheme. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme can withstand common external and internal attacks in UAV clusters while ensuring lightweight energy consumption and scalability of UAV computing networks.
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.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are operated remotely without the presence of a unified system of identity authentication, and wireless communications in untrusted environments can cause the loss of valuable data carried by UAVs. Traditional UAV authentication mechanisms are centralized approaches, which suffer from a single point of failure problem and may incur high complexity computations. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a distributed authentication mechanism between the ground station controller (GSC) and a UAV. Moreover, in case of UAV swarms, the high mobility of the UAVs affects the stability of UAV communications, which leads to the degradation of the UAV authentication performance. Addressing these challenges, we design a blockchain-based distributed authentication mechanism, known asSwarmAuth, for UAV swarms, where the GSC and UAVs follow a mutual authentication approach using physical unclonable functions (PUFs), and the K-means clustering-based intelligent approach is used to dynamically create location-based clusters. The blockchain helps store UAVs’ authentication information in an immutable storage and the associated smart contracts provide a convenient access control model. The security analysis of SwarmAuth is carried out through both formal and informal proofs considering general attacks. Experimental evaluation shows that SwarmAuth can assure trustworthy communications and improve the network performance.
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.
Die Wang, Yunjian Jia, Mianxiong Dong, Kaoru Ota · 5 authors
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) networks exist security and privacy issues on task offloading, which can not be tackled by conventional security mechanisms. In this article, we consider consortium blockchain combined with UAV-assisted MEC networks to overcome these challenges. An improved Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus scheme is designed in which the UAVs act as light nodes to collect the tasks and verify their signatures from the ground users to form the initial block and then offload it to the ground blockchain nodes for final block generation. We ensure the trustworthiness of the ground blockchain nodes through voting by the reputation incentive mechanism. The two-stage the UAV and ground blockchain nodes by jointly optimizing the trajectory and communication resource allocation of the UAV and computing resource allocation of the ground blockchain nodes. Furthermore, we analyze the Stackelberg equilibrium by the backward induction and adopt the approximate convex algorithm (SCA) to approximate the non-convex problem solving. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed scheme for trusted management and superior delay.
With the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) technology and the expansion of UAV application scenarios, the demand for communication and airspace resources is increasing explosively. Traditional UAV authentication and access control schemes cannot meet the requirements of seamless access, and face security and efficiency challenges. Considering the mobility of UAVs, cross-domain authentication operations are repeatedly performed, resulting in low efficiency. Centralized authentication scheme faces the risk of single point of failure. In addition, relying solely on cryptography methods cannot meet regulatory requirements. To solve the above challenges, we present a blockchain-assisted UAV authentication and access control scheme, where regulatory authority (RA) and service provider (SP) collaborate on-chain to conduct UAV management efficiently and securely. Specifically, Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) is introduced to help regulation in our scheme. Access point (AP) completes the UAV access based on ADS-B signals and on-chain information, which makes the access process reliable and secure. We demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our scheme through extensive experiments.
With the rapid advancements in mobile communication technology, secure and efficient data transmission has become increasingly important. The space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) provides ubiquitous communications and stimulates the development of intelligent networks. Blockchain, as a decentral-ized distributed ledger technology, ensures the security of data transmission and makes it difficult for attackers to tamper with or steal data. This paper investigates the application of blockchain technology in SAGIN for mobile edge computing. Blockchain is utilized to ensure the security of data transmission, while unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites provide computing services for Internet of things (IoT) devices. This paper aims to solve the average system processing efficiency maximization problem that jointly considers data computation volume, latency, and energy consumption. As this problem is non-convex and difficult to solve using traditional methods, we propose a deep reinforcement learning approach to obtain the offloading strategy. Experimental results demonstrate the convergence and effectiveness of our proposed method compared to other benchmark methods.