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Abstract

The popularity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in various fields has been rising recently. UAV technology is being invested in by numerous industries in order to cut expenses and increase efficiency. Therefore, UAVs are predicted to become much more important in the future. As UAVs become more popular, the risk of cyberattacks on them is also growing. One type of cyberattack involves the exposure of important flight data. This, in turn, can lead to serious problems. To address this problem, a new method based on lightweight cryptography and steganography is proposed in this work. The proposed method ensures multilayer protection of important UAV flight data. This is achieved by two layers of encryption using a polyalphabetic substitution cipher and ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated encryption, as well as randomized least significant bit (LSB) steganography. Most importantly, through this work, a balance is kept between security and performance. Additionally, all experiments are carried out on real devices, making the proposed method more practical. The proposed method is evaluated using MSE, PSNR, and SSIM metrics. Even with a capacity of 8000 bytes, it achieves an MSE of 0.04, a PSNR of 62, and an SSIM of 0.9998. It is then compared to existing methods. The results show better practical use, stronger security, and higher overall performance.

Details

1009240
Business indexing term
Title
Securing UAV Flight Data Using Lightweight Cryptography and Image Steganography
Author
Volume
16
Issue
5
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
Science and Information (SAI) Organization Limited
Place of publication
West Yorkshire
Country of publication
United Kingdom
ISSN
2158107X
e-ISSN
21565570
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
ProQuest document ID
3222641072
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/securing-uav-flight-data-using-lightweight/docview/3222641072/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
© 2025. This work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2025-06-25
Database
ProQuest One Academic