An authentication scheme for FANET packet payload using data hiding

Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) are gaining much traction in recent years due to their wide range of applications, resulting in the emergence of a number of studies on the facilitation of their widespread adoption. One of the key areas being investigated is the establishment of security strategies to combat the large amount and variety of security threats that they inevitably face when they are operating in the field. Since a majority of FANET's operations involve the transmission of network packets containing both instructions and sensitive data, the protection of these packets is critical. This paper proposes an authentication scheme to protect the payload of the packets being transmitted within the FANET. Since FANETs are highly resource-constrained, we opted for a lightweight and energy-efficient approach. The proposed scheme essentially encodes the payload of a physical layer data frame into a compact bit stream, which is subsequently embedded into the cyclic prefix (CP) at the physical layer. The encoding process includes the XOR-operation and JBIG2 lossless compression. At the receiver's end, the hidden authentication data is extracted and decoded for comparison against the payload of the received data frame. Two enhancements are introduced to further enhance robustness against masquerade attack. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of bit error rate (BER) under different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) settings. In all considered SNR settings, the proposed authentication scheme achieves BERs of <0.7∗10⁻⁴ when 7-bit Hamming code is implemented. Experiment results also confirm that proposed scheme is able to localize the tampered data frames.