Development of a Lightweight Secure Communication System for UAVs Enhanced by an Unconventional Chaotic Communication Architecture

Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of transmitted data for single- and multi-agent systems is becoming crucial to protect these systems against potential threats. This is precisely the focus of this work that introduces a novel approach for securing communications between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In particular, to safeguard the data against attacks in UAV networks, implemented for military-grade or critical infrastructure operation scenarios, different security techniques are combined, including the employment of a chaotic synchronization-based communications architecture. The proposed chaotic-synchronized, secure communications system (UAV-CSCS) is applied onboard a UAV and comprised of three layers, namely a VPN server (initial security layer), a custom ROS-based framework (data collection and distribution layer), and a lightweight chaotic communications module (secondary security layer). UAV-CSCS’s main component is a transmitter-receiver communication architecture based on chaotic synchronization that successfully encodes and decodes information over a chaotic signal, enabling secure information exchange between agents. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed system, a prototype is designed, developed, and thoroughly tested in real-world multi-UAV experiments. The results demonstrate secure, real-time communication with low-power consumption and minimal resource allocation (in terms of CPU and RAM), validating the system’s efficiency and applicability.