Secure Real-Time Multimedia Data Transmission from Low-Cost UAVs with A Lightweight AES Encryption

In the context of real-time wireless multimedia transmission from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), equipped with microphone arrays and cameras, data security is crucial. Data security should be guaranteed from the acquisition onboard the drones to its delivery to the destination node or ground station. A real-time light-weight application-level Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption algorithm has been considered to be applied to multimedia data and supported by the single-board-computers mounted onboard the drones, with low computational power. The study shows that the main advances are related to the design of a streaming application in a transmission architecture for military counter-UAV scenarios that is effective, secure, quick, and trustworthy for audio and video data. A multiple synchronous key management is also newly experimented. The thorough experiments have confirmed the effective validity of the encryption and decryption processes, even in the presence of adverse radio spectrum conditions.