A Practical Secret Key Management for Multihop Drone Relay Systems based on Bluetooth Low Energy

In this paper, we present a practical secret key management for data relay security of bluetooth-connected drones. Time-varying received signal strengths between the drones and the ground sensing nodes are quantized to generate the secret key pairs, where the quantization interval is adjusted to reduce the number of mismatched secret key bits. To validate the key management performance, a multihop aerial relay system testbed is developed based on the MX400 drone platform and the bluetooth low energy radio transceiver.