RTT-Based Rogue UAV Detection in IoV Networks

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being used in different emerging domains for accomplishing many critical tasks. However, due to the various constraints, such as battery life, computational resources, etc., a UAV under a mission (M-UAV) often needs assistance from an edge/cloud server that is reachable from the M-UAV’s location. A connection between an M-UAV and edge server can be established via an access point or AP. Therefore, before sharing any sensitive information with the edge server, it is essential for an M-UAV to determine the legitimacy of the selected AP. Recently, some works in this direction indicate that a rogue UAV (R-UAV) can successfully mimic a legitimate AP for intercepting the communication channel. Hence, there should be a robust detection mechanism in place for addressing such a threat scenario. In this article, considering one of the emerging domains—the Internet of Vehicle (IoV) networks, at first, we show that communication in the IoV networks can get benefit from the presence of M-UAVs. However, as the link between the M-UAV and edge server can be intercepted by an R-UAV, the adversary may access the sensitive information from the IoV networks. Followed by this, we propose a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">timing-based</i> algorithm for identifying the presence of rogue APs (or R-UAVs) in the channel. The M-UAV executes the timing-based algorithm, and the detection method <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">does not</i> require any auxiliary hardware or any modification to the network protocols for meeting the objective. Supported by an extensive evaluation study, we show that without any rigid restriction on the M-UAV’s speed (e.g., by limiting it to almost static) the proposed approach significantly enhances the detection accuracy (at least by a margin of 29.7% and 16.65%) compared to the state-of-the-art methods.