DASLog: Decentralized Auditable Secure Logging for UAV Ecosystems

Rapid technological advancements in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have revolutionized intelligent platforms such as smart cities. These advancements have paved the way for an emerging class of Internet of Things (IoT) systems called the Internet of Drones (IoD), which has noteworthy security and privacy challenges. In this article, we tackle the problem of secure logging and design a novel secure logging scheme—DASLog—for the use case of aerial transport of (medical) goods via drones. Our logging scheme provides public auditability of logging records in the setting where all logging components are managed by a single entity. Our secure logging system relies on hash chains and a Merkle tree to generate proofs for stored logging records. These proofs get written on a private blockchain and can be used later by data consumers to verify the integrity and completeness of a set of logging records. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach via a proof-of-concept prototype relying on Hyperledger Besu and implemented on multiple Amazon EC2 instances. The performance evaluation of our demonstrator shows that up to 8000 logging records per second can be processed.