Securing UAV Communications with Homomorphic Encryption and Key Regeneration: A Model Checking Approach

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are at the centre of multiple applications across various fields, including delivery, disaster response, and surveillance. However, its use of wireless communications exposes them to security risks such as information distortion and interception. The paper presents a security model based on Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Key Regeneration (KR) with the incorporation of Model Checking to enhance UAV communication security. Our system employs homomorphic encryption that resolves the data security problem by ensuring data security at the transmission stage, where information is processed at the receiver end without decryption, thus maintaining privacy and the data processing policy at the UAV end. Furthermore, the key regeneration protocol updates the encryption keys regularly, thus reducing the risk denial window and impact in case of key compromise. The security of the protocols is proven through model checking that establishes the system status operation through a systematic study, as per the provided security requirements. The simulation results indicate certain trade-offs in the system with performance degraded in encryption time and computations, unlike the existing system. The system enhancement outweighs the performance, as indicated by the minimized level of threat and integrity violation. Therefore, integrating HE and KR can secure UAV communication in the presence of a smart and capable adversary, making the entire system robust and dependable in the line of operation.