# Dronecrypt - An Efficient Cryptographic Framework for Small Aerial Drones

## TL;DR

This paper introduces Dronecrypt, a novel energy-efficient cryptographic framework tailored for small aerial drones, combining optimized public key infrastructure and lightweight symmetric primitives to enhance security while conserving energy.

## Contribution

It presents the first optimized PKI-based cryptographic framework for small drones, integrating precomputation and elliptic curves, with implementation and energy analysis on real hardware.

## Key findings

- Achieves up to 35x lower energy consumption compared to standard cryptography.
- Provides a full cryptographic framework combining PKI and lightweight primitives.
- Demonstrates practical implementation on Crazyflie 2.0 drone.

## Abstract

Aerial drones are becoming an integral part of application domains including but not limited to, military operations, package delivery, construction, monitoring and search/rescue operations. It is critical to ensure the cyber security of networked aerial drone systems in these applications. Standard cryptographic services can be deployed to provide basic security services; however, they have been shown to be inefficient in terms of energy and time consumption, especially for small aerial drones with resource-limited processors. Therefore, there is a significant need for an efficient cryptographic framework that can meet the requirements of small aerial drones. We propose an improved cryptographic framework for small aerial drones, which offers significant energy efficiency and speed advantages over standard cryptographic techniques. (i) We create (to the best of our knowledge) the first optimized public key infrastructure (PKI) based framework for small aerial drones, which provides energy efficient techniques by harnessing special precomputation methods and optimized elliptic curves. (ii) We also integrate recent light-weight symmetric primitives into our PKI techniques to provide a full-fledged cryptographic framework. (iii) We implemented standard counterparts and our proposed techniques on an actual small aerial drone (Crazyflie 2.0), and provided an in-depth energy analysis. Our experiments showed that our improved cryptographic framework achieves up to 35x lower energy consumption than its standard counterpart.