Abstract
Advances in technology have enabled the increased use of autonomous systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in military operations and other critical military communications. While the use of autonomous systems has greatly facilitated military operations, provided a global view of the operational environment and eased sensitive data collection, making possible reduced casualties, it has also created a greater cyber attack surface due to its high level of automation. The existence of adversaries targeting this attack surface can seriously damage military operations by tampering with critical message content used in autonomous systems decision making. In order to ensure the successful operation of autonomous military systems, mechanisms must be developed to strictly protect the integrity of the collected / exchanged data and messages, and an immutable record of each message must be provided. These mechanisms should also be used to control autonomous systems under critical failures or attacks occurring during or after military operations. Blockchain has recently emerged as a technology that provides a decentralized architecture to achieve an unchangeable history of interactions between parties that are part of a distributed network. While blockchain is currently used in various fields such as cryptocurrencies, supply chain management and e-voting systems, it also has the potential to provide secure communication in autonomous systems. In this study, a blockchain-based communication architecture is proposed that guarantees integrity assurance and permanent recording of messages exchanged between all parties, including UAVs and ground control stations, in a military autonomous system network. The proposed secure communication architecture has been theoretically evaluated in terms of its resistance to the types of cyber attacks frequently encountered in distributed systems, and it has been shown to provide protection against attacks that compromise data integrity as well as spoofed authentication attempts. The proposed blockchain-based architecture is promising to increase the resilience of military autonomous systems against cyberattacks that aim to hurt the success of military operations through data content manipulation.
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