Random Number Generator Using Sensors for Drone

Abstract

In recent years, drones have been widely used in many areas such as farming, movie making, surveillance and delivery. So, there is a need to protect these drones against security attacks including hijacking, spying and theft of stored data through the utilization of security mechanisms. Cryptographic keys are needed to operate these security mechanisms, and they must be generated by using random number generators which create unpredictable and non-regenerable random numbers. However, existing random number generators used in drones are not tailored for drones specifically as they use random sources generated on a desktop, not a drone. Recently, random number generators utilizing sensors in mobile phones and IoT (Internet of Things) devices have been studied, but are not appropriate for drones. In this paper, considering that drone sensors must be applied to flight and stationary modes, we proposed a drone specific random number generator called DroneRNG and implemented it. Then, we showed that our DroneRNG passed all of the NIST randomization tests and possesses better statistical properties and unpredictability than random number generators that are currently used in drones.