Securing UAV Networks: A Lightweight Chaotic-Frequency Hopping Approach to Counter Jamming Attacks

Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are becoming more and more widespread for a variety of uses, including delivery, inspection, and monitoring. On the other hand, safe communication between drones is a crucial problem that must be solved. The current lightweight authentication mechanisms designed to protect UAV communications have failed to mitigate jamming attacks effectively. In this work, we design a novel approach to secure UAV communication by the combination of frequency hopping and chaotic mapping. The designed approach mitigates jamming attacks, as Chaotic maps’ unpredictability and randomness create a secure frequency hopping sequence. We describe in detail about planning, analysis, and application of the designed approach, and analyze the performance using a network simulator. The results show that our proposed work successfully mitigates jamming attacks and establishes secure UAV communication. Our work significantly enhances the design of a secure drone communication system. By incorporating our designed approach, flying robots can operate in a wide range of applications with high security and reliability.