Enhancing the Security of the MAVLink with Symmetric Authenticated Encryption for Drones

The Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) protocol plays a crucial role in enabling communication between drones and Ground Control Stations (GCS). With the increasing adoption of drones, the security and integrity of MAVLink protocol have also become paramount. This paper delves into the fundamental aspects of MAVLink, highlighting its security challenges and proposing potential solutions to enhance its resilience against cyber threats. The study presents findings on the vulnerabilities of the MAVLink protocol and introduces a novel approach to securing communications on the MAVLink protocol for drones. The paper evaluates different Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) schemes and their impact on the performance of MAVLink, emphasizing the importance of encryption and authentication for ensuring data security. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the Chacha20Poly1305 encryption mechanism in execution time, the AES-OCB3 scheme as the least CPU-intensive, and AES-CCM in terms of memory usage. By adding the AEAD scheme into the MAVLink payload, we not only provide message confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity but also provide MAVLink header integrity to the drone environment.