QKD-based Secure Communication for UAV

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become increasingly popular because of the emergence of application areas such as the Internet of Drones (IoD). Ensuring secure data transmission in drone networks is crucial for protecting sensitive information and preventing unauthorized access, which is particularly important for applications such as surveillance, delivery, and disaster response. However, there is no standard and efficient way for providing cryptographic protection to the communication between a UAV and its ground station (GS), which is critical for completing its task without leaking sensitive information to illegal users. In this paper, a quantum key distribution (QKD) based mechanism is proposed to facilitate secure communication between the UAV and its GS. A software-based QKD approach is created for distributing the symmetric key over the wireless communication channel between the UAV and GS devices. The experimental results show that our approach is effective to protect communication with negligible overhead.