LS-AODV: A ROUTING PROTOCOL BASED ON LIGHTWEIGHT CRYPTOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES FOR A FANET OF NANO DRONES

Abstract

With the battlespace rapidly shifting to the cyber domain, it is vital to have secure, robust routing protocols for unmanned systems. Furthermore, the development of nano drones is gaining traction, providing new covert capabilities for operators at sea or on land. Deploying a flying ad hoc network (FANET) of nano drones on the battlefield comes with specific performance and security issues. This thesis provides a novel approach to address the performance and security concerns faced by FANET routing protocols, and, in our case, is specifically tailored to improve the Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. The proposed routing protocol, Lightweight Secure Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (LS-AODV), uses a lightweight stream cipher, Trivium, to encrypt routing control packets, providing confidentiality. The scheme also uses Chaskey-12-based message authentication codes (MACs) to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of control packets. We use a network simulator, NS-3, to compare LS-AODV against two benchmark routing protocols, AODV and the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol, in order to gauge network performance and security benefits. The simulation results indicate that when the FANET is not under attack from black-hole nodes, LS-AODV generally outperforms OLSR but performs slightly worse than AODV. On the other hand, LS-AODV emerges as the protocol of choice when a FANET is subject to a black-hole attack.ONROutstanding ThesisLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited