UAV identification system based on memristor physical unclonable functions

Abstract

The latest decades presented a large development of various size and types of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Nowadays, there are over 200 million UAVs used in various applications and there it is a large effort to adopt national and international regulation for using them. There it is a real need for the development of a reliable system for UAVs identity verification that can be implemented and used at global level. To this moment the software-based methods such as MAC address, IDs memorized on devices are prone to a large number of cyber-security vulnerabilities and attacks. This paper presents an innovative hardware-based identification solution which could be adapted to UAVs in a non-intrusive manner. The proposed solution is based on physical unclonable functions (PUF), which are implemented by using memristors. The proposed solution is very low cost and high performance. By using memristors, it is possible to generate a very large number of unclonable IDs, using only a few electrical components. This solution could be incorporated in any UAVs systems without major modifications and not affecting their flight parameters.