Secure Drone Communications using MQTT protocol

Abstract

With the revolutionary change in emerging technologies, the usage of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has exponentially increased in different sectors like Industry, healthcare, military, agriculture, real estate, manufacturing, logistics, energy and many more utilities. This rapid growth creates a concern for the secure communication between the internal communication modules and the ground based computer system used for controlling the UAV. Intruder can hack into the device and attack the internal communication device with the injection of the malicious code which can lead to the malfunction of the aircraft. Security issues related to the communication between the internal modules of the drone and the ground based computer system is of major concern and is crucial. UAVs have to operate in constrained networks with limited bandwidth. In such a constrained environment MQTT protocol can be an excellent protocol. No cryptographic techniques are used to retain the simplicity and the light weight of the MQTT protocol. This contributes for the large scope for emerging with new solutions in the protection issues of MQTT communications. This paper mainly focuses on Armstrong number encryption standard algorithm for providing a computationally simple yet a secure and strong algorithm for UAVs encryption and decryption process on the communication links using MQTT protocol.