Lightweight Digital Signature Solution to Defend Micro Aerial Vehicles Against Man-In-The-Middle Attack

Micro aerial vehicles, a.k.a. drones, have become an integral part of a variety of civilian and military application domains, including but not limited to aerial surveying and mapping, aerial surveillance and security, aerial inspection of infrastructure, and aerial delivery. Meanwhile, the security and privacy of drones are gaining significant attention due to both financial and strategic information and value involved in aerial applications. Due to the lack of security features in communication protocols, an adversary can easily interfere with on-going communications or even seize the control of drone. In this paper, we propose a lightweight digital signature protocol, also referred to as DroneSig, to protect drones from man-in-the-middle attack, where an adversary eavesdrops the communications between Ground Control Station (GCS) and drone, and impersonates the GCS and sends fake commands to terminate the ongoing mission or even take control over the drone. The basic idea of the DroneSig is that the drone will only execute the new command after validating the received digital signature from the GCS, proving that the new command message is coming from the authenticated GCS. If the validation of digital signature fails, the new command is rejected immediately and the Return-to-Launch (RTL) mode is initiated and forces the drone to return to takeoff position. We conduct extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation and comparison with existing Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Data Encryption Standard (DES), and Triple DES (3DES). The simulation results show that the proposed DroneSig can achieve better performance in terms of energy consumption, computation time, CPU cycle, memory usage, and code size, indicating a viable and competitive approach defending drones against man-in-the-middle attack.