Towards a trusted unmanned aerial system using blockchain (BUAS) for the protection of critical infrastructure

Abstract

With the exponential growth in the number of vital infrastructures such as nuclear plants and transport and distribution networks, these systems have become more susceptible to coordinated cyber attacks. One of the effective approaches used to strengthen the security of these infrastructures is the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for surveillance and data collection. However, UAVs themselves are prone to attacks on their collected sensor data. Recently, Blockchain (BC) has been proposed as a revolutionary technology which can be integrated within IoT to provide a desired level of security and privacy. However, the integration of BC within IoT networks, where UAV's sensors constitute a major component, is extremely challenging. The major contribution of this study is two-fold. (1) survey of the security issues for UAV's collected sensor data, define the security requirements for such systems, and identify ways to address them. (2) propose a novel Blockchain-based solution to ensure the security of, and the trust between the UAVs and their relevant ground control stations (GCS). Our implementation results and analysis show that using UAVs as means for protecting critical infrastructure is greatly enhanced through the utilization of trusted Blockchain-based Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs).