SECURE COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL FOR UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES

MAVLink is the most widely used open telemetry and control protocol, providing bidirectional communication between the onboard systems of unmanned aerial vehicles and ground control stations. Despite the minimal overhead for transmitting telemetry data and navigation commands, the basic versions of the protocol do not provide end-to-end encryption of the payload. This creates critical vulnerabilities in the communication channel to attacks such as eavesdropping, control hijacking, GPS/telemetry spoofing, and replay attacks. In this study, an adaptive security layer for the MAVLink protocol was developed and experimentally verified. A two-stage protection scheme is proposed, which includes custom substitution mapping and dynamic frame encryption without transmitting an unencrypted session key over an unencrypted communication channel. Attacks were simulated in the ArduPilot SITL / Mission Planner environment with packet interception and analysis in Wireshark. The results were validated in terms of transmission speed, performance, and efficiency compared to solutions described in the literature, such as MAVSec, and compared to the original MAVLink protocol. The results we achieved significantly exceed those reported in the literature and MAVLink in terms of security.