PIC: Preserving Data Integrity in UAV Assisted Communication

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for diverse activities has increased rapidly in recent years. Nonetheless, if operational cyber security is not handled effectively, these technologies offer a significant hazard which can cause catas-trophic harm. Therefore it is important to identify the potential attacks that can be implemented by an adversary. Traditional methods for data integrity designed for the Internet are not suitable for UAV assisted vehicular or wireless sensor networks due to the high communication overhead and latency required. This paper proposes a lightweight data integrity technique called PIC to address this problem. Every device, at regular intervals, generates an authentication parameter that depends on the packets transmitted. The authentication parameters are only delivered to a central server or the destination device where the integrity of the packets is verified. The proposed algorithm, i.e., PIC, does not include computationally expensive cryptographic algorithms. Therefore, the overhead introduced by embedding message authentication code (MAC) to every transmitted packet is significantly reduced. A formal security proof is presented in this paper to demonstrate the robustness of PIC, i.e., the PIC can identify malicious UAVs effectively. A performance analysis using NS-3 is also presented to show that PIC detects malicious UAVs with minimum communication overhead and latency.