A Defense Mechanism Against DoS Attacks on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Communication

Abstract

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in every field is increasing rapidly. In order for UAVs to perform their duties correctly, they must be able to maintain continuous communication with ground stations. The use of WiFi wireless communication protocol has increased due to its high bandwidth. One of the most important threats that can threaten this type of communication is Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. In the event of such an attack, the UAV becomes inaccessible and may crash. Especially when the open port number is known, it becomes much easier to perform attacks that consume the resources of the drone. In this study, a mechanism is proposed to eliminate or at least mitigate the attack risk. This mechanism enables UAVs using wireless communication (WiFi) to communicate using TCP over UDP using middleware. In addition, by periodically changing the UDP open ports with a secret port number sequence known to both parties, it prevents the attacker from using the open port for a long time and renders the attack ineffective. In this study, the effects of the port hopping method on UAVs are evaluated. Test results on real systems shows that the proposed system makes the communication system of UAVs more resistant to DoS attacks by 91.2%.