eMAVLink: Enhancing MAVLink for Secure and Robust UAV Communication

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized across diverse industries, yet their communication protocols remain vulnerable to cyber threats and performance bottlenecks. MAVLink, the widely adopted standard for UAV communication, offers lightweight messaging but lacks robust security measures. This paper introduces eMAVLink, an enhanced protocol that integrates advanced cryptographic mechanisms to improve security and efficiency. We conduct a comparative evaluation of hashing and encryption algorithms utilized in eMAVLink, assessing the performance on both cryptographic co-processors and general-purpose CPUs. Our analysis examines end-to-end encryption, mutual authentication, replay attack prevention, and message integrity verification, quantifying their computational overhead across hardware-accelerated and software-based implementations. Additionally, we explore the trade-offs between security strength and real-time performance in dynamic UAV environments. The results highlight eMAVLink's ability to achieve enhanced security while maintaining low computational overhead through optimized cryptographic offloading. This study provides key insights into the feasibility of deploying secure and efficient UAV communication protocols across diverse hardware architectures.