Secure routing protocol design for UAV Ad hoc NETworks

Abstract

UAV Ad hoc NETworks (UAANET) are a new form of ad hoc networks in which nodes are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Ground Control Station (GCS). Although this field generated a certain interest in the scientific community, it has only received a modest contribution. Compared to Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET), this new network paradigm has some unique features and brings specific challenges such as node mobility degree, network connectivity patterns, delay-sensitive applications and network security. Indeed, some UAV communication architectures have been proposed, but none of them has been designed with security in mind. This lack of scientific investigation can make the certification of UAANETs difficult to obtain. In this paper, we present our vision of such a challenge and the research that we are conducting to reach this objective. The aim is to propose an original secure routing protocol for UAVs using a MDD (Model Driven Development) approach which will ease the certification of final UAV products. The first preliminary results concerning our secure-routing protocol design will be presented. This paper describes our ongoing research which will provide secure communications for UAV ad hoc networks at the end of the SUANET (Secure Uav Ad-hoc NETwork) project. Index Terms-UAV Ad hoc NETwork (UAANET), Security Architecture, Model Driven Development, Routing Protocol. 1 UAVs used in UAANETs are deployed in untrustworthy environments in which external attacks can occur due to the absence of fixed infrastructure 2 DGAC: Direction Générale de l Aviation Civile which is equivalent to FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) but at a French scale.

Extended verification of secure UAANET routing protocol

“…Our mobility pattern and emulation system certainly affected the measures, but we found similar results to those exposed in [15]. Accordingly, in [6], we introduce the model design of SUAP (Secure Uav Ad hoc routing Protocol). Also, a first preliminary outdoor experiments have been carried out in [16] to evaluate its network requirements and performances.…”

“…Figure 4 represents the model driven development workflow and schematizes the integration process. It is composed of the seven different steps as explained in [6].…”

“…Accordingly, we simulate blackhole attacks within UAANET environment 6 . In blackhole attack, an attacker breach the route discovery process by forging false routing packets to intercept data packets exchanged between neighbors.…”

“…With regards to Embedded coder, it is a code generator containing several integrated model and code consistency verification tools used with Simulink & Stateflow framework to validate the conformance between SUAP high-level models (security requirements) and its associated source code. This latter is performed to contribute to UAS certification as initially presented in our previous work [6].…”

IEEE 802.11n vs. IEEE 802.15.4: A Study on Communication QoS to Provide Safe FANETs

“…Moreover, in [7], MANET reactive protocols have been validated using MDD approach. Similarly, in [8] [9], secure FANET routing protocols is designed with MDD approach while taking into account the FANET safety requirements. The authors use a general network architecture and perform unit testing and code verification through formal verification tools for safety validation purposes.…”