ASMTP: Anonymous secure messaging token‐based protocol assisted data security in swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles

• Published in: International journal of network management 2024-11, Vol.34 (6), p.n/a
• Main Authors: Manikandan, Kayalvizhi, Sriramulu, Ramamoorthy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: blockchain; Communication; cyberattacks; Cybersecurity; data security; Jamming; Military applications; Secrecy aspects; secure messaging protocol; Security aspects; Spoofing; Surveillance; UAVs; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 1055-7148; 1099-1190
• DOI: 10.1002/nem.2271

Swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) broaden the field of application in various fields like military surveillance, crop monitoring in agriculture, combat operations, etc. Unfortunately, they are becoming increasingly susceptible to security attacks, such as jamming, information leakage and spoofing, as they become more common and in more demand. So, there is a wider need for UAVs, which requires the design of strong security procedures to fend off such attacks and security dangers. Even though several studies focused on security aspects, many questions remain unanswered, particularly in the areas of secure UAV‐to‐UAV communication, support for perfect forward secrecy and non‐repudiation. In a battle situation, it is extremely important to close these gaps. The security requirements for the UAV communication protocol in a military setting were the focus of this study. In this paper, we present the issues faced by the UAV swarm, especially during military surveillance operations. To secure the communication link in UAV, a new protocol for UAV Swarm communication is proposed with anonymous secure messaging token‐based protocol (ASMTP). The proposed protocol secures UAV‐to‐base station communication and safeguards the metadata of the sender and receiver nodes. The proposed model maintains the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data in the UAV Swarm and achieves robustness. In addition, it provides a different strategy for the cybersecurity gaps in the swarm of UAVs during military surveillance and combat operations. This paper propose an anonymous secure messaging token‐based protocol (ASMTP) to secure the communication link between UAV and the GCS. We develop a secure payload communication in the original MAVLink communication protocol to provide additional layer of security without increasing the overhead and the CPU processing. Our proposed method achieves data security in UAV communication where the performance metrics such as throughput, packet loss and CPU utilization percentage are used to assess the network performance. The performance results show that the proposed model secures the UAV communication link more efficiently and effectively without impacting system efficiency and performance.