Blockchain Enabled Secure Authentication for Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Abstract

The integration of air and ground smart vehicles is becoming a new paradigm of future transportation. A decent number of smart unmanned vehicles or UAS will be sharing the national airspace for various purposes, such as express delivery, surveillance, etc. However, the proliferation of UAS also brings challenges considering the safe integration of them into the current Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems. Especially when the current Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcasting (ADS-B) systems do not have message authentication mechanisms, it can not distinguish whether an authorized UAS is using the corresponding airspace. In this paper, we aim to address these practical challenges in two folds. We first use blockchain to provide a secure authentication platform for flight plan approval and sharing between the existing ATM facilities. We then use the fountain code to encode the authentication payloads and adapt them into the de facto communication protocol of ATM. This maintains backward compatibility and ensures the verification success rate under the noisy broadcasting channel. We simulate the realistic wireless communication scenarios and theoretically prove that our proposed authentication framework is with low latency and highly compatible with existing ATM communication protocols.

A Privacy-Preserving Solution for Intelligent Transportation Systems: Private Driver DNA

“…2) Blockchain-Based Authentication: another significant and rising schema category is the Blockchain-Based Authentication, where blockchain technology is used to authenticate the nodes and for the operations of the network. For example, in [23] and [24] the authors propose frameworks for secure and safe integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into complex networks, using blockchain and simulating realistic wireless communication scenarios. Blockchain is also proposed as a possible solution for communications in VANETs, where Feng et al [25] describes an efficient and scalable blockchain-assisted privacy-preserving authentication system for VANETs.…”