A Secure Real-time Multimedia Streaming through Robust and Lightweight AES Encryption in UAV Networks for Operational Scenarios in Military Domain

Abstract

This article proposes a framework of application-level security, an HW-SW implementation of a low-cost solution for real-time multimodal data encryption and decryption for security applications in protected environments like espionage, situational awareness, monitoring, and counter-UAV. Data is captured from drones equipped with microphone arrays and cameras. This is performed by exploiting acoustic event analysis, video tracking, and recognition, performed on a ground station. All the communications are delivered in a secure data channel. Integrity and secrecy of the sensitive data acquired by drones must be guaranteed until the data is delivered in real-time from UAVs to the destination node. A possible data exploit may cause critical problems if the data is intercepted by malicious attackers. Being the drones equipped with low energy consuming devices with low computational power, like single-board-computers, a real-time lightweight application-level AES encryption, in addition to the MAC encryption of the wireless communication channel, has been considered. In the experiment, the encryption and decryption process has been optimized, even under adverse transmission conditions ensuring continuous data encryption even if some packets are lost or the connection is repeatedly dropped and reestablished.