Authentication and Key Management in an LTE-Based Unmanned Aerial System Control and Non-payload Communication Network

Abstract

UA (Unmanned Aircraft) technology has rapidly advanced and its civilian applications such as public safety, research operation, and agricultural operation have been employed. To securely integrate the UAs into the general airspace, a reliable link to control and monitor those UAs is essentially required. The link between a UA and its GCS (Ground Control Station) is referred to as the CNPC (Control and Non-Payload Communication) link and the network including UAs and GCS is referred to as the integrated CNPC network. The CNPC link may include a terrestrial network such as the LTE (Long Term Evolution) and the terrestrial network connects a UA to a GCS. In this paper, we propose a communication architecture to integrate the LTE technology into the integrated CNPC network and defines the security requirements of the communication architecture. Then, we modify an authentication and key agreement protocol and handover key management protocols for the network. We compare the modified protocols with LTE counterpart protocols. Our comparison shows that the modified protocols outperforms the LTE counterpart protocols in terms of security while it induces almost the same volume of communication overhead. Our future work is to do a series of simulations to evaluate the performance and security of our protocols rigorously.