An Unorthodox Security Framework using Adapted Blockchain Architecture for Internet of Drones

Abstract

The evolution of drones from military applications to the consumer world has seen many technological developments. COVID-19 pandemic also witnessed the deployment of drones in a large number of citizen-centric applications. The increasing number of drones and limited operational arena should have a well-suited ecosystem for the success of collaborative operations. As a result, the Internet of Drones (IoD) emerged as a modular framework employing algorithmic coordination of drones. Although these developments have been welcomed they bring along a wide range of security challenges. Drones are highly mobile and they rely on wireless links to communicate among themselves and with the infrastructure. Moreover, they carry a lot of data related to the application where they are deployed. Thus, this brings attention to the security aspects involved in the IoD ecosystem, including various challenges and the mechanisms available to address those challenges. Though several conventional security techniques (like encryption, encoding, and hashing) are already available they are not fully optimized for the IoD environment. This mechanism involves an associated overhead and trade-offs when deployed in the IoD scenario due to limited computational capability of drones. Hence, this brings the necessity to explore alternative security mechanisms like blockchain. However, the conventional blockchain has its limitation of heavy computational primitives (like mining) and may not be useful for the IoD. Hence, we have proposed an unorthodox security framework using an adapted blockchain architecture for IoD. This unorthodox mechanism was validated in a simulated environment and proved to be suitable for the IoD ecosystem.