Secure Video and Telemetry FPGA Architecture For UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used in a wide range of applications. However, since they are vulnerable to cyberattacks security protocols for their data are used. Common existing approaches for data encryption/decryption are based on commercial software platforms which execute their tasks with latency and consume a lot of energy. Moreover, they focus mostly on encrypting/decrypting telemetry data. This paper proposes a Field Programming Gate Array (FPGA)-based architecture for encrypting/decrypting all data exchanged between UAVs and their Ground Station (GS). This architecture uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), known for its robustness, to enhance the confidentiality, integrity, and security. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture performs faster than implementations on well-known software platforms while it consumes less power.