Secure LoRa Drone-to-Drone Communication for Public Blockchain-Based UAV Traffic Management

Area of Science:

• Aerospace Engineering
• Computer Science
• Cybersecurity

Background:

• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) face significant collision risks.
• Existing centralized UAV Traffic Management (UTM) systems suffer from security vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in handling distributed flight data.
• Centralized UTM systems lack the low-latency communication crucial for real-time UAV operations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a secure, decentralized UTM system integrating Drone-to-Drone (D2D) communication.
• To enhance collision avoidance capabilities for UAVs through direct inter-drone communication.
• To improve the security and efficiency of UAV flight data management.

Main Methods:

• Integration of a D2D communication protocol utilizing SHA256 hash function and bitwise XOR operations into a public blockchain-based UTM system.
• Development of a proof-of-concept to validate system security and functionality.
• Security analysis to evaluate resistance against common cyber threats.

Main Results:

• The proposed system enables secure, direct D2D communication for efficient collision avoidance.
• The blockchain-based UTM system ensures that only authorized entities with valid secret keys can access sensitive flight data.
• The protocol demonstrated robust security against key disclosure, adversary-in-the-middle, replay, and tracking attacks.

Conclusions:

• The integrated D2D protocol within a secure blockchain UTM framework significantly enhances UAV safety and operational efficiency.
• The system offers superior performance with minimal computation (0.01 ms) and storage (544-800 bits) costs compared to existing solutions.
• This approach provides a scalable and secure solution for managing complex UAV traffic in BVLOS operations.