LIFT

Implementation of Secure communication between Drone and Control Center.
This project is undertaken at the Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven, Belgium.

Specifications:

• Key Establishment Protocol : Station-to-Station Protocol
• Encryption : Symmetric key encryption using Chacha20 cipher
• AEAD : Chacha20-Poly1305 AEAD scheme by DJB
• Signature : ECDSA over elliptic curve P-256 by NIST
• Hash : SHA-256 Keccak Implementation

After successful Key Establishment, we are able to achieve:

• Send secure commands
• Send secure status updates under secure request
• Send secure binary stream, with enough throughput as to support video streaming (with configurable packet sizes)
• Send new requests and receive responses while still drone is sending bitstream in the background
• There is a session timeout as well after which new session will be established and different set of session keys will be computed.

Implementation Details:

For source code:

LIFT/src

For code benchmarking:

LIFT/benchmark

To build source code:

cd LIFT/ --> make clean --> make

Executables are control_launcher and drone_launcher, open two terminals and execute them.
control_launcher - Control Center launcher, this is always the initiator.
drone_launcher - Drone is always the responder.

On executing control_launcher, an user can make the below choices:

• Establish Drone Connection - choosing this, control center will initiate the key establishment protocol with the drone. The control center and the drone shall retransmit each other if the messages/responses are not reached successfully.
• Close the System - will exit the terminal

Below are a few choices when the Key Establishment Phase Successful:

• Get Drone Status - sends a command request to drone to fetch its status. Status menu will be shown to select the type of satus (like GPS coordinates, Temperature, Battery Level etc)
• Send Command to Drone - sends commands to drone to make control decisions. Control menu will be shown to select the type of control (like move left/right/up/down)
• Start Video Stream from Drone - this will initiate the video stream from drone to the control center, in the current architecture, video stream (is just a binary stream in this case) data which the control center will receive and process in background in a separate thread (Control center can still communicate with the Drone while video is streaming in the background)
• Terminate Video Stream from Drone - this will make a request to Drone to stop the video stream, in the end it displays the total number of frames received with the size.
• Restart Session - this will reinitate the session.
• Close the system - this will exit the terminal.

NOTE:

• For changing any performance related actions like enabling debug logs/BER or changing parameters, please change in LIFT/src/config.h
• For changing IP addresses and ports of control center and drone, change in LIFT/src/control/control_launcher.c and LIFT/src/drone/drone_launcher.c

For more details/suggestions contact:

• Ferdinand Hannequart ([email protected])
• Lien Wouters ([email protected])
• Tejas Narayana ([email protected])