DP-Authentication: A novel deep learning based drone pilot authentication scheme

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have recently been proposed as flying base stations for providing reliable service to IoT devices. However, due to the lack of effective authentication schemes, UAVs are often hijacked by adversaries, which raises a high potential for sensitive information leakage. Therefore, designing a real-time authentication scheme is essential to enhance UAV safety. Up to the present, several works exist about pilot authentication by classifying radio-control signals. As propagating through the open environment, radio-control signals can be sniffed, analyzed, and simulated, posing significant threats to UAV security. For this reason, we propose a novel deep learning-based drone pilot authentication scheme, DP-Authentication, to protect UAVs from malicious radio-manipulated attacks. Specifically, we collect UAV flight data from the onboard PX4 flight stack and feed them into the authentication scheme to validate pilot legal status dynamically. As verified by comprehensive experiments, the proposed authentication scheme can authenticate pilots with an accuracy of 95.24% and detect malicious hijacking with an accuracy of 96.82%. Thanks to the low system overhead, it holds great promise for deployment on the UAV side to monitor pilot legal status in real-time.