CerDES - A Certificateless DTLS-Based Encryption Solution for IEEE 802.15.4 Drone Communications

Today more and more applications including drones use the communication standard IEEE 802.15.4 to transmit manifold data over the network. This data is often of sensitive matter like navigation data or measured data triggering actions. To provide secure communication within these networks, it is required to have security solutions that can run efficiently on devices that have, due to the nature of their hardware, limited resources. Symmetric-key systems can provide confidentiality by using a shared secret, but run into the key distribution problem, as these secrets need to be agreed upon and exchanged securely. Asymmetric-key systems allow for entities that have never met before to exchange key material over an unsecure channel, and use it to agree upon a shared secret. Nevertheless, the necessity of authenticating the public key to avoid impersonation attacks is of utmost importance, and is usually done with certificates. CerDES an authenticated certificateless key agreement scheme is integrated into the DTLS protocol, forgoing the need for certificates to authenticate the exchanged key material. CerDES allows end-to-end secure communication between the wireless network devices, like drones, and a central server. The evaluation proved that sniffing tools are unable to analyse the encrypted payload as long as no access exists to the central server hosting the keys. Thus, it can be stated separation of server activities is an essential key for security in wireless environments.