AUTHENTICATION AND ENCRYPTION OF AERIAL ROBOTIC COMMUNICATION

The rapid development of aerial robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has transformed them from niche radio-controlled toys into critically important components of modern cyber-physical systems. Modern autonomous drones are designed with an open modular architecture, allowing easy integration of various sensors, computing units, and computer vision systems. This adaptability has facilitated their mass adoption in the military sphere, logistics, infrastructure monitoring, and rescue operations. However, the transition from controlling individual drones to the concept of fully autonomous swarms, where hundreds of devices interact with each other without a human operator, drastically exacerbates the cybersecurity problem. Traditional remote-control systems, which historically relied on open 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz radio frequency channels, no longer meet security requirements. The integration of aircraft into urban and tactical airspace requires the implementation of reliable IP-based communication protocols, in particular Wi-Fi family technologies. They are able to provide not only command transmission but also high-resolution video exchange with minimal latency. At the same time, ensuring cryptographic protection of these channels faces a fundamental obstacle: strict size, weight, and power constraints. Onboard microcontrollers of drones have limited battery resources and computing power, making traditional "heavy" encryption algorithms inefficient or even impossible to deploy in the air. This article proposes a comprehensive analysis and innovative approaches to building secure aerial robotics networks. The work begins with an overview of modern communication architectures, including the evolution of telemetry protocols. Next, fundamental vulnerabilities of existing networks are investigated, and cyber-physical threats, such as satellite navigation coordinate spoofing and control hijacking, are analyzed. The main focus of the research is centered on developing a mathematically and energetically efficient encryption and authentication system based on elliptic curve algorithms, the TLS 1.3 transport protocol, and modern key generation and distribution standards.