Abstract

The applications of drones have become increasingly more versatile, with their popularity also increasing rapidly in the last decade. These applications span from entertainment within civilian markets to more military-based applications, including private security firms. However, with this rise in use, the security risks involved have also increased drastically, predominantly in a drone’s lack of ability to authenticate surrounding drones efficiently and securely without the aid of a third party. Although there have been copious amounts of research to support drone authentication, they predominantly rely on a single source of truth, such as a ground station server (GCS), which presents its risks as a single point of failure. This thesis aims to present a novel protocol called LiDDAS (Lightweight Decentralised Drone Authentication System) that allows for drone enrolment and authentication within a decentralised environment, which does not rely on a third party or single central server. From our analysis, our protocol successfully provides mutual authentication between drones and resistance to various attacks. Overall, our protocol contributes to cyber security by offering a new method of enrolment and authentication without some of the typical drawbacks observed in common current approaches. Additionally, we used AVISPA to validate and verify our protocol’s claim against attacks defined in Dolev-Yao’s threat model.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Drone aircraft--Security measures; Drone aircraft--Control

Publication Date

5-13-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Computing Security (MS)

Advisor

Wesam Almobaideen

Advisor/Committee Member

Omar Abdul Latif

Advisor/Committee Member

Kevser Akpinar

Comments

This thesis has been embargoed. The full-text will be available on or around 7/22/2025.

Campus

RIT Dubai

Plan Codes

COMPSEC-MS

Download

Available for download on Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Share

COinS