Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in applications such as surveillance, healthcare, rescue, and crowdsensing. However, the network management of these applications is quite challenging, given the mobility of UAVs. In this scenario, the network softwarization, which decouples the hardware from the network control functions, becomes essential. Moreover, the fifth-generation (5G) communication network is used to disseminate the data from controller-to-UAV and UAV-to-Internet of Things (IoT) enabled devices. However, handling the security and privacy of data against the eavesdropper is a challenging aspect that needs to be resolved efficiently. Most of the solutions presented in the literature are based on a centralized architecture having a single point of failure and are also vulnerable to various security attacks such as controller hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks. Motivated by these facts, we present a blockchain-based secure data dissemination scheme for softwarized UAV networks. The proposed scheme can detect an eavesdropper, analyze malicious data, and mitigate various security attacks on the SDN controller. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves superior results in detecting the eavesdropper and anomalous data before adding them into the blockchain compared to other state-of-the-art schemes.
Internet of Drones (IoD)-enabled aerial computing can effectively reduce communication delay and energy consumption as compared to conventional computing environments. It seems very useful for its deployment in disaster areas, emergency relief and battlefield communications. However, different types of attacks, such as replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, credential leakage, and other types of data modifications, are possible in an IoD-based communication environment. Therefore, we need a highly robust security protocol to prevent the occurrence of these types of attacks in IoD-enabled aerial computing environments. Moreover, blockchain, a tamper-proof technology, adds more security in the designed security protocol. To cope with these issues, we propose a “blockchain-based secure communication framework for Internet of Drones enabled aerial computing deployment (BCF-IoDAC)”. We also provide a security analysis of the proposed BCF-IoDAC which proves its resilience against various types of passive and active attacks. The security and performance comparison of the proposed BCF-IoDAC is conducted with the closely related existing schemes, and its performance is also better than the compared schemes, as BCF-IoDAC provides more security and functionality features with low computation and communication costs. In addition, the blockchain-based practical demonstration of the proposed BCF-IoDAC is provided to measure its impact on the computational time on a varied number of transactions per block and a varied number of blocks mined in the blockchain.
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.
Moayad Aloqaily, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi, Mohsen Guizani
The aerial capabilities and flexibility in movement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has enabled them to adaptively provide both traditional and more contemporary services. In this article, we introduce a solution that integrates the capabilities of both UAVs and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) to provide both intelligent connectivity and services to both aerial and ground connected devices. A cooperative solution is adopted that considers nodes’ power and movement constraints. The UAV and UGV cooperative process ensures continuous power availability to UAVs to support seamless and continuous service availability to end-devices. A Federated Learning (FL) approach is adopted at the edge to ensure accurate and up-to-date service provisioning in accordance with the surrounding environment and network constraints. Moreover, Blockchain technology is used to decentralize the provisioning and control aspects, and ensure authenticity and integrity. Extensive simulations are conducted to test the soundness and applicability of the proposed solution. Results show significant improvement in terms of connectivity, service availability, and UAV energy enhancements when compared to traditional mobile and vehicular communication techniques.
This paper proposes a generic scheme VaCoChain, that fuses blockchain (BC) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) underlying fifth-generation (5G) communication services for timely vaccine distribution during novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and future pandemics. The scheme offers 5G-tactile internet (5G-TI) based services for UAV communication networks (UAVCN) monitored through ground controller stations (GCs). 5G-TI enabled UAVCN supports real-time dense connectivity at ultra-low round-trip time (RTT) latency of [Formula: see text] and high availability of 99.99999%. Thus, it can support resilient vaccine distributions in a phased manner at government-designated nodal centers (NCs) with reduced round trip delays from vaccine production warehouses (VPW). Further, UAVCNs ensure minimizes human intervention and controls vaccine health conditions due to shorter trip times. Once vaccines are supplied at NCs warehouses, then the BC ensures timestamped documentation of vaccinated persons with chronology, auditability, and transparency of supply-chain checkpoints from VPW to NCs. Through smart contracts (SCs), priority groups can be formed for vaccination based on age, healthcare workers, and general commodities. In the simulation, for UAV efficacy, we have compared the scheme against fourth-generation (4G)-assisted long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) channels, and traditional logistics for round-trip time (RTT) latency, logistics, and communication costs. In the BC setup, we have compared the scheme against the existing 5G-TI delivery scheme (Gupta et al.) for processing latency, packet losses, and transaction time. For example, in communication costs, the proposed scheme achieves an average improvement of 9.13 for block meta-information. For 4000 transactions, the proposed scheme has a communication latency of 16 s compared to 36 s. The packet loss is significantly reduced to 2.5% using 5G-TI compared to 16% in 4G-LTE-A. The proposed scheme has a computation cost of 1.6 ms and a communication cost of 157 bytes, which indicates the scheme efficacy against conventional approaches.
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.
Liang Zhao, Muhammad Bin Saif, Ammar Hawbani, Geyong Min · 6 authors
Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET) has drawn significant consideration due to its rapid advancements and extensive use in civil applications. However, the characteristics of FANET including high mobility, limited resources, and distributed nature, have posed a new challenge to develop a secure and efficient routing scheme for FANET. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel cluster based secure routing scheme, which aims to solve the routing and data security problem of FANET. In this scheme, the optimal cluster head selection is based on residual energy, online time, reputation, blockchain transactions, mobility, and connectivity by using Improved Artificial Bee Colony Optimization (IABC). The proposed IABC utilizes two different search equations for employee bee and onlooker bee to enhance convergence rate and exploitation abilities. Further, a lightweight blockchain consensus algorithm, AI-Proof of Witness Consensus Algorithm (AI-PoWCA) is proposed, which utilizes the optimal cluster head for mining. In AI-PoWCA, the concept of the witness for block verification is also involved to make the proposed scheme resource efficient and highly resilient against 51% attack. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms its counterparts and achieves up to 90% packet delivery ratio, lowest end-to-end delay, highest throughput, resilience against security attacks, and superior in block processing time.
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.
In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) enabled drones, also called as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are widely used in many applications ranging from military to civilian applications, such as wildlife monitoring. Since the drones provide a risk-free as well as low-cost facility in order to quickly and persistently monitor natural circumstances at high spacial temporal resolution, they help in wildlife monitoring research. Due to wireless communication nature, the communication among the deployed drones in their respective flying zones and the IoT smart devices installed in animal bodies, and also among the drones and their respective ground station server (GSS), is susceptible to various passive and active attacks. To mitigate these issues, we propose a public blockchain based access control implementation for wild-life monitoring purpose. The application of both access control and blockchain at the same time not only protects various attacks, but also maintains immutability, transparency as well as decentralization properties. Next, we simulate the proposed security framework for the blockchain part to measure the total computational time needed to add a varied number of blocks in a blockchain and also a varied number of transactions per block. Finally, a practical testbed experiment has been implemented to show the feasibility of the proposed framework.
Yuntao Wang, Zhou Su, Qichao Xu, Ruidong Li · 5 authors
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have brought numerous potentials to establish flexible and reliable emergency networks in disaster areas when terrestrial communication infrastructures go down. Nevertheless, potential security threats may occur on UAVs during data transmissions due to the untrustful environment and open-access UAV networking. Moreover, UAVs typically have limited battery and computation capacity, making them unaffordable to execute heavy security provisioning operations when carrying out complicated rescue tasks. In this paper, we develop RescueChain, a secure and efficient information sharing scheme for UAV-aided disaster rescue. Specifically, we first implement a lightweight blockchain-based framework to safeguard data sharing under disasters and immutably trace misbehaving entities. A reputation-based consensus protocol is devised to adapt the weakly connected environment with improved consensus efficiency and promoted UAVs' honest behaviors. Furthermore, we introduce a novel vehicular fog computing based off-chain mechanism by leveraging ground vehicles as moving fog nodes to offload UAVs' heavy data processing and storage tasks. To optimally stimulate vehicles to share their idle computing resources, we also design a two-layer reinforcement learning based incentive algorithm for UAVs and ground vehicles in the highly dynamic networks. Simulation results show that RescueChain can effectively accelerate consensus process, enhance user payoffs, and reduce delivery latency, compared with representative existing approaches.
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.
Anik Islam, Tariq Rahim, Md Masuduzzaman, Soo Young Shin
Contagious disease pandemics present a significant threat worldwide in terms of both human health and economic damage. New diseases emerge annually and place enormous burdens on many countries. Additionally, using humans to handle pandemic situations increases the chances of disease spreading. Therefore, various technologies that do not directly involve humans should be employed to handle pandemic situations. The Internet of Drones (IoDT), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain are emerging technologies that have revolutionized the modern world. This article presents a blockchain-based AI-empowered pandemic situation supervision scheme in which a swarm of drones embedded with AI is engaged to autonomously monitor pandemic outbreaks, thereby keeping human involvement as low as possible. A use case based on a recent pandemic (i.e., COVID-19) is discussed. Two types of drone swarms are used to handle multiple tasks (e.g., checking face masks and imposing lockdowns). A lightweight blockchain is considered to handle situations in remote areas with poor network connectivity. Additionally, a two-phase lightweight security mechanism is adopted to validate the entities in the proposed scheme. A proof of concept is established using an experimental environment setup and dataset training. An analysis of the experimental results demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed scheme.
Yilong Hui, Nan Cheng, Zhou Su, Yuanhao Huang · 7 authors
The customization of edge computing services is one of the key research fields in sixth-generation (6G) heterogeneous vehicular networks (HetVNETs). With various personalized requirements of vehicles on computation-intensive applications, how to explore the heterogeneous computing resources in the 6G HetVNETs to guarantee vehicles with the customized Quality of Experience (QoE), therefore, becomes a challenge. In this article, we develop a novel secure scheme to provide personalized edge computing services for moving vehicles (MVs) in 6G HetVNETs. In the scheme, a smart-contract-based secure edge computing architecture is designed by jointly considering the attack models and the characteristics of the 6G network infrastructures (e.g., satellites, drones, base stations, and roadside units), where each network infrastructure manages a number of parking vehicles to complete computing services collaboratively. With this architecture, based on the available computing resources owned by different network infrastructures, the collaborative computing resource allocation algorithm is designed to help each network infrastructure decide a customized service strategy (CSS) to satisfy the QoE of MVs. After deciding the CSSs, a model based on the second price-sealed auction is formulated to describe the competition among the network infrastructures, where the Nash equilibrium of the game is obtained to guide their optimal bidding strategies to obtain the chance for completing the services. The security analysis and the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can defend against the attacks and lead to a lower cost for completing the services than the conventional schemes.
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.
Siyi Liao, Jun Wu, Jianhua Li, Ali Kashif Bashir · 5 authors
The Internet of Drones (IoD) is a layered network control architecture, which is having a revolutionary impact on the monitoring and preservationvof the environment. Large-scale drone-assisted environmental monitoring can provide a better perspective and high-quality data by monitoring the operation of critical components of smart cities. However, with the continuous expansion of IoD scale and the increase of multi-drone collaboration tasks, the large-scale drone-assisted service in smart cities monitoring will inevitably encounter the problem of relay and transfer of drone control. Lack of a trust collaboration paradigm between drone controllers will bring huge security challenges to real-time monitoring the environment, collaboration of tasks, data, location privacy of drones, and so on. To address this important issue in IoD, this article proposes a paradigm that uses smart contracts and blockchain to ensure trusted collaboration between controllers of software defined IoD (SD-IoD). First, we propose a novel SD-IoD architecture to enhance the support for heterogeneity and flexibility of IoD for monitoring of the environment. Second, we propose a controller consortium blockchain for secure and efficient cooperation and interoperability of drone controllers, which includes a new cryptographic currency cooperation coin and a new consensus mechanism proof of security guarantee (PoSG). Third, we have designed a novel incentive mechanism to encourage controllers to maintain their security and provide safer services to other controllers. The security analysis and performance simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are emerging as a powerful tool in various industrial applications in the context of enabling Industrial IoT. The limited power source and flight time of UAVs along with the need for skilled UAV operators are some of the most daunting challenges to the integration of UAVs in industrial applications such as site inspection, workforce monitoring, logistics, and others. In this article, we propose the unique paradigm of AerialBlocks for blockchain.enabled UAV virtualization to provide virtual UAV-as-a-service for industrial applications. AerialBlocks also aims at providing secure and persistent UAV services to the end-users along with a partially decentralized blockchain model to ensure security, privacy, service quality, and transparency. UAV virtualization allows persistent UAV services, globally, without procuring any physical UAVs. The platform offers virtual UAV services on a pay-per-use basis to the end-user. The UAV owners and virtual UAV service providers gain monetary benefits for their contribution to the UAV service offerings. Finally, we discuss the implications of the proposed platform on the domains of Industrial IoT and the possible challenges in the implementation of this paradigm.