Performance Evaluation of a Prototype UAV-Based Secure Communication System Employing ROS and Chaotic Communications

Providing secure communications has become imperative in single- and multi-agent systems that need to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of the transmitted data, especially when these systems are employed in critical in-frastructure applications. This work presents a novel approach for secure communications between a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to safeguard the confidentiality of the data exchanged in such a multi-agent system, employing the robot operating system (ROS), a virtual private network (VPN), and a chaotic-based communication architecture. Specifically, a custom ROS-based framework is developed to collect and distribute the UAV sensor data, while a VPN network is deployed as the first layer of security for the system. Subsequently, a lightweight chaotic-based module is incorporated as the second layer of security to enable secure communications between the UAVs in real time. To evaluate the proposed system, a prototype multi-UAV system is designed, implemented, and extensively tested in a real-world environment. The proposed system achieves secure real-time communications, with low power consumption and minimal processing resources (CPU and RAM usage), demonstrating its applicability for the energy-constrained UAV-based system under consideration.