Skip to main content
Article
Improving communication security of open source UAVs: Encrypting radio control link
2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)
  • Michal Podhradsky, Galois Inc.
  • Calvin Coopmans, Utah State University
  • Nathan V. Hoffer, Utah State University
Document Type
Article
Publisher
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Location
Miami, FL
Publication Date
6-13-2017
Abstract

Safety and reliability (also referred to as airworthiness) are well-known factors of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operations, and significant effort has been put into maintaining and improving them for everyday UAV users. Cyber-security, on the other hand, gained attention only recently. Currently, a malicious user can relatively easily disturb operation or even seize control of the most popular open-source UAVs, as a result of their poor communications security (COMSEC). Even though solutions to improve UAV's COMSEC are known, they have not been fully implemented in a user-friendly way. The contribution of the paper is an implementation of an encrypted Radio Control (RC) link that can be used with a number of popular RC transmitters. We use Galois Embedded Crypto library, an ArduinoLibs Crypto library together with openLRSng open-source radio project. We provide some lessons learned during development, implementation, and testing so users wishing to use their own encrypted link can leverage our work.

Citation Information
Michal Podhradsky, Calvin Coopmans and Nathan V. Hoffer. "Improving communication security of open source UAVs: Encrypting radio control link" 2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) (2017)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/calvin-coopmans/28/