Authorized Arming and Safeguarded Landing Mechanisms for Drones

Safety and security is a major concern that needs attention in the field of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones. The failure to ensure high standards of security will inevitably result in the endangerment of people and property. Crafting such security measures is heavily dependent on the hardware and software control capabilities of drones. In a drone mission, arming involves controlling drone motors and plays a critical part in its flight. Unauthorized arming is a major security challenge associated with drones. To this end, a Randomized Logistic map based Time-dependent One Time Password (Randomized LTOTP) algorithm as a mechanism of authenticating the drone-arming procedure is proposed. In addition, unintended flight termination is a potential safety threat that needs to be mitigated in any drone application. Existing systems trigger drone landing as soon as they detect low battery levels. This often results in hazardous and spontaneous landing conditions. As an attempt to mitigate this issue, a Flag based Battery Fail-Safe (FBFS) algorithm is proposed to monitor in-flight battery levels and safeguards the landing by prolonging the mission until the landing is safe. The simulation results show that the Randomized LTOTP algorithm achieves 92% randomness, which improves the security of the arming process, and FBFS improves the flight time approximately by 3-fold compared with the existing algorithm.