FPGA-Based Hardware Encryption of Power Line Patrol Drones

Communication of power line patrol UAV is currently protected with frequency hopping. However, malicious adversaries can steal sequence of frequency hopping and control the patrol UAV. In view of the security protection needs of patrol UAV in the process of field inspection, this paper proposes a method for hardware encryption communication and authentication protection based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The patrol UAV is equipped with an embedded secure access module (ESAM) using fix encryption. The remote controller gets the symmetric secret key from the management system of patrol UAV. Thereafter, the secret key is embedded in the FPGA-based encryption system, and the communication between UAV and remote controller can be protected with hardware-based encryption. The proposed approach is of hardware encryption/decryption for both UAV and remote controller, and can meet the security protection needs of UAVs with stringent real-time requirement.