Enhancing MAVLink Security: Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Encryption on a Drone Testbed

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are being extensively deployed in various military as well as civilian applications. The Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) protocol is widely used for communication between a UAV and a Ground Control Station (GCS). However, under this protocol, the UAV and the GCS communicate through an unencrypted channel, due to which malicious actors can eavesdrop on the channel with relative ease. Numerous research efforts have aimed to integrate encryption into the MAVLink protocol, but these works have been confined to theoretical analyses or simulation-based demonstrations. This paper demonstrates the integration of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption with counter (CTR) mode into the MAVLink protocol on a drone testbed. We conducted a number of flight tests to assess the drone functionality with and without encryption. Our results show that the integration of AES-CTR encryption into MAVLink causes only minimal overheads in the system performance. In particular, the encryption and decryption times are small and there is only a slight increase in the memory consumption and CPU load due to encryption. Our validation of the AES-CTR encryption scheme on a drone testbed demonstrates that it is a secure and practical solution for real-world applications.