A Duffing Map Based Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Micro Aerial Vehicles

Andrew Wall* and Cong Pu
Department of Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering, Marshall University, Huntington, WV 25755

Presentation Category: Science & Technology (Oral Presentation)

Student’s Major: Computer and Information Security

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have become a popular and important part of military and civilian applications and are used in a variety of areas, including aerial surveying and mapping, aerial surveillance and security, and aerial delivery. Meanwhile, the cybersecurity of MAVs is becoming a greater concern due to financial and strategic value involved in aerial applications. In this project, we propose a duffing map based lightweight authentication protocol, also referred to as MAVCrypto, to protect MAVs from man-in-the-middle attack, where an adversary eavesdrops on communication between Ground Station (GS) and MAV, impersonates the GS, and sends commands to sabotage the ongoing mission or take control over the MAV. The basic idea of the MAVCrypto is the MAV will only execute the new command after validating the received digital signature from the GS. If the validation of digital signature fails, the new command is rejected immediately and the Return-to-Launch (RTL) mode is initiated, forcing the MAV to return to take-off position. We plan to conduct extensive experiments to evaluate and compare performance using network simulator OMNeT++.

Funding: West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission, Division of Science and Research

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: a West Virginia SURE program