Securing Data Sharing from the Sky: Integrating Blockchains into Drones in 5G and Beyond

Abstract

5G and beyond (B5G) networks significantly promote the popularity and ubiquity of drones by providing high-throughput and low-latency communication. In B5G drone networks, data sharing among drones has great potential to improve and enrich civilian and commercial applications, such as surveillance monitoring. Nevertheless, a series of security challenges arise such as data privacy leakage due to the lack of reliable centralized supervision. In this article, we employ the permissioned blockchain technology to propose a decentralized data management system. The permissioned blockchain deployed at pre-selected ground base stations is particularly suitable and practical for ensuring efficient peer-to-peer data sharing in B5G drone networks. However, the ground base stations working as miners are widely deployed without strong security protection, which may be compromised to produce maliciously manipulated results during the block verification in the permissioned blockchain. Hence, the miner selection is crucial for the permissioned blockchain-based B5G drone networks. We therefore introduce credit as a metric and propose a secure credit-based miner selection scheme using a four-weight subjective logic model. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed schemes are effective for secure data sharing in permissioned blockchain-based B5G drone networks.