Evaluation of cryptography applied to broadcast storm mitigation algorithms in FANETs

The use of networks of small autonomous aircraft shall become a trend in the coming years in order to increase the scalability of missions like monitoring and surveillance, for example. The network composed exclusively by these aircraft is known as Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET), a new ad hoc fashion network with new challenges to be faced. Applications running on a FANET eventually require the use of security mechanisms. To verify which one is the most appropriate for embedded systems like those used in such autonomous aircraft, it is necessary to carry out a study about the cryptographic methods in these platforms. In this paper, we have added the symmetric-key algorithm AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) to three broadcast mitigation algorithms experimented in our previous work. The purpose is to guarantee confidentiality when exchanging messages and avoid an attacker to ruin the broadcast control strategies, what would let the network susceptible to the broadcast storm problem. We have performed outdoor experiments using an embedded platform and the results are analyzed in this paper and compared with the ones of the previous work, in which cryptography was not employed. Results show that a strong symmetric-key encryption did not significantly influenced the performance of the mitigation algorithms and can be applied to these systems without performance penalty.