01366nam a2200145 a 450000500170000000800400001710000170005724500840007426400160015833600090017433800200018352009050020350600460110885600660115420260901030333.0250101s2019    xx     o     000 0 eng d1 aAzza Allouch10aMAVSec: Securing the MAVLink Protocol for Ardupilot/PX4 Unmanned Aerial Systems 1barXivc2019  atext  aonline resource  aThe MAVLink is a lightweight communication protocol between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and ground control stations (GCSs). It defines a set of bi-directional messages exchanged between a UAV (aka drone) and a ground station. The messages carry out information about the UAV's states and control commands sent from the ground station. However, the MAVLink protocol is not secure and has several vulnerabilities to different attacks that result in critical threats and safety concerns. Very few studies provided solutions to this problem. In this paper, we discuss the security vulnerabilities of the MAVLink protocol and propose MAVSec, a security-integrated mechanism for MAVLink that leverages the use of encryption algorithms to ensure the protection of exchanged MAVLink messages between UAVs and GCSs. To validate MAVSec, we implemented it in Ardupilot and evaluated the performance of diffe0 aOpen access — freely available to read.40uhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.00265v2yRead the full paper (PDF)