BLOCKCHAIN-ENVISIONED DRONES: REALIZING 5G-ENABLED
FLYING AUTOMATION
Analysis of Using Blockchain to Protect the Privacy of Drone Big Data
Zhihan Lv, Liang Qiao, M. Shamim Hossain, and Bong Jun Choi
Abstract
In order to solve the problem of privacy pro-
tection of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) big
data, it is necessary to design a privacy protec-
tion scheme that guarantees safe sharing of UAV
big data. In this work, blockchain technology is
adopted to solve the privacy protection prob-
lem of UAV big data. In particular, the proposed
privacy protection scheme uses a number theo-
ry research unit cryptosystem for encryption of
blockchain data. Privacy analysis is provided to
validate the security requirements. The perfor-
mance evaluation results show that the proposed
UAV big data privacy protection scheme based
on blockchain technology has low computing
cost in terms of key production, encryption, and
decryption. It also outperforms the conventional
approaches. This work aims to provide a guide-
line for future research on the privacy protection
of UAV data.
Introduction
With the continuous progress in advanced tech-
nology and evolution in social structure, peo-
ple’s pursuit of new technology also changes.
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), an aircraft
without a human pilot, is one of the latest techno-
logical advances and is gradually penetrating our
lifestyle [1, 2]. As the market scale of UAVs con-
tinuously increases, and different applications of
UAVs emerge, the privacy protection of the vast
amount of data that can be generated by UAVs
has become a critical security issue.
Fueled by the rapid development of informa-
tion and communication technologies, big data
is influencing all sectors of society. Nowadays, no
matter which industry you are in, you are using
big data in one way or the other, and the UAV
is no exception. However, providing information
security and privacy of big data is still a great chal-
lenge [3]. Currently, big data privacy is the big-
gest bottleneck in the development of big data
applications. Due to various networks, different
types of information and data stored on various
distributed devices (e.g., user terminals, network
servers, and clouds), the level of security threat
has increased overall, making the data more vul-
nerable to attackers. Even now, the data leakage
problem has continuously been popping up one
after another in many different countries.
The big data privacy of drones will also
become a critical issue as drones can collect
data from a wide geographical area, and drones
Digital Object Identifier: Zhihan Lv and Liang Qiao are with Qingdao University; M. Shamim Hossain (corresponding author) is with the Chair of Pervasive and Mobile Computing,
10.1109/MNET.011.2000154 King Saud University; Bong Jun Choi is with Soongsil University.
44 0890-8044/21/$25.00 © 2021 IEEE
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have become more sophisticated with different
sensors and actuators. However, little attention
is given to its security implications. For example,
the UAV industry in China is mainly focusing
on the production quantity, market share, and
growth [4]. Such a focus on rapid development
may create many unforeseen complications. One
of the biggest problems is the UAV cloud data
management system. The UAV has now become
an essential component in the development of
services, manufacturing, and public safety. As a
result, UAV big data is tightly integrated with our
society. Hence, the leakage of big data may even
have an impact on national security [5]. There-
fore, the privacy protection of UAV big data is
attracting more and more attention.
Recently, blockchain technology has emerged.
It is regarded as a technology to realize data
storage with tamper-proof, traceable, and decen-
tralized features, which can effectively improve
the efficiency of data processing. Moreover, the
technology integrates distributed data storage, a
consensus mechanism, a point-to-point (P2P) net-
work, and an encryption algorithm [6]. Moreover,
blockchain technology provides a new direction
in information security and privacy. Many studies
have shown that blockchain technology can effec-
tively solve various security and privacy problems
[7, 8].
Therefore, in this work, the advantages of
blockchain technology in information security and
privacy is adopted to solve the privacy protection
problem of UAV big data. The article is organized
as follows. In the following section, related work
is presented. Following that, preliminaries of the
blockchain technology, P2P network, number the-
ory research unit (NTRU) cryptographic algorithm,
and other related technologies are introduced.
Following that, a privacy protection scheme for
UAV big data based on blockchain technology is
proposed. Then the performance of the UAV big
data privacy protection scheme is evaluated. The
conclusion is given in the final section.
Literature Review
UAVs are expected to help innovate many dif-
ferent sectors of society. However, data priva-
cy protection of UAVs remains a critical issue
in its development. Before the development of
blockchain technology, Zhang et al. (2018) [9]
proposed an access control scheme for secure-
ly storing data for information security protec-
tion. This scheme combines access control and
an identity-based encryption mechanism. This
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 scheme requires the generation of public keys,
which are based on the user’s identity, condition,
and purpose. The corresponding private key is
used to authenticate the user. Hue et al. (2019)
[10] enabled each encryption item to gener-
ate its own access control strategy to achieve
fine-grained information sharing. The protection
of information is realized using attribute-based
encryption on mobile devices. As such, various
data protection mechanisms can be used to
achieve data sharing and protection. However,
there remain challenges when applying them to
UAV applications.
Since the introduction of blockchain technolo-
gy, researchers have found that blockchain tech-
nology has excellent prospects in user information
privacy protection. Hence, there has been a rapid
development of blockchain technology in var-
ious application areas. Awan et al. [11] (2019)
presented a new consensus mechanism to real-
ize the sharing of medical information. Gueain
et al. [12] (2018) presented various privacy pro-
tection mechanisms in private chain networks by
using blockchain technology and an evaluation
framework of medical information privacy. The
mechanism can share model parameters between
different institutions without exposing the private
information of patients. It can be applied in dis-
tributed online machine learning algorithms to
increase operability between different institutions.
In summary, the initial effort using convention-
al encryption mechanisms for data information
protection has many limitations. The blockchain
technology has been successfully applied in many
different applications, including medical infor-
mation security, to solve security and privacy
problems effectively. Therefore, blockchain tech-
nology has high potential to solve privacy protec-
tion problems of UAV big data.
Preliminaries
The Blockchain Method
Blockchain technology has many advantages over
conventional security technologies. The main
goal of blockchain technology is to protect the
information in the database from being tampered
with or stolen. Asymmetric encryption is a form of
encryption where a pair of keys (i.e., a public key
and a private key) are used. For example, when
a public key is used to encrypt a block of data,
the corresponding private key must be used to
decrypt the encrypted information. Conversely,
when a private key is used for encryption, the cor-
responding public key must be used for decryp-
tion. There is a relation between the public and
private keys. In a database system, the private
key is generated by random selection, while the
public key is generated using multiple encryp-
tion functions, which prevents data from being
changed. Therefore, the asymmetric encryption
on the blockchain provides extremely high securi-
ty performance [13].
In the process of data storage, the decen-
tralized and distributed structure of blockchain
distributes and stores blocks, containing records,
across many network nodes. Hence, information
is not centrally stored in the same host. Since
many nodes are involved in the information stor-
age process, the information is recorded on a
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Application Programmable Programmable Programmable
layer
currency finance society
Smart Algorithm
Contract layer Script code
contract mechanism
Incentive layer Issuing mechanism Distribution mechanism
Consensus layer POW POS DPOS ...
Communication Verification
Network layer P2P network
mechanism mechanism
Block data Chain structure Timestamp
Data layer
Hash Asymmetric
Merkel tree
function encryption
FIGURE 1. Blockchain technical framework diagram.
block only after being verified by other nodes.
The verification failure does not affect the distribu-
tion structure or paralyze the distributed database
system. Thus, the blockchain data system can con-
tinue to operate.
Blockchain technology has the characteristics
of an encryption algorithm, a consensus mecha-
nism, the distributed node for data storage, and
P2P transmission [14]. The consensus mechanism
is an essential component of the blockchain. It
uses a mathematical algorithm to build trust
and gain rights between different nodes in the
blockchain system. Blockchain collectively uses a
decentralized approach to maintain the reliability
of a distributed ledger. A blockchain system can
verify transactions without the requirement of a
trusted third party. Blockchain can record trans-
actions between two parties efficiently and make
them permanently verifiable [15]. Blockchain has
a data layer, a network layer, a consensus layer,
an incentive layer, a contract layer, and an appli-
cation layer, as shown in Fig. 1.
NTRU Cryptographic Algorithm
The NTRU cryptosystem was first introduced
in the 1990s as a polynomial public key cryp-
tosystem based on the polynomial convolution
ring. In recent years, it is one of the most pop-
ular cryptosystems in the public-key cryptosys-
tem. NTRU cryptography includes the NTRU
encryption algorithm and the NTRU signature
algorithm. The NTRU algorithm has lower com-
plexity than the other lattice-based cryptosys-
tems. The privacy protection mechanism of UAV
big data is adopted based on the advantages
of the NTRU cryptographic algorithm. NTRU is
a public key cryptosystem, which is based on
the hard problem of CVP or SVP in NTRU lat-
tice. In the NTRU algorithm, not only ring size M
and “large modulus” Q are used, but also “small
modulus” P, which is basically integer 2 or 3 or
polynomial 2 + X, is used. The numbers P, Q,
and XN – 1 are chosen so that they are relatively
prime in the ring Z[X]. Parameters include dis-
tributed D f , D g , D m , and D r . NTRU algorithm
includes the process of key generation, encryp-
tion, and decryption.
45
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Block chain
Recording on the blockchain Read on the blockchain
Cloud layer
Transaction
Cloud layer
Read
Upload download Upload download Upload download
Data layer
User layer
FIGURE 2. Privacy protection model for UAV data.
desIgn of PrIvAcy ProtectIon scheme for uAv
bIg dAtA bAsed on bLockchAIn technoLogy
system modeLs And desIgn obJectIves
The privacy protection model of UAV big data is
shown in Fig. 2. The model includes a user layer,
a data layer, a cloud layer, and a blockchain
layer. In the user layer, users use blockchain
technology to prevent shared data from being
stolen or tampered with. In addition, they can
also use blockchain technology to track transac-
tions. In the data layer, the information that the
user wants to protect is stored. An NTRU pass-
word is used to encrypt and protect the data.
The data layer is interfaced with the cloud layer
to share the data. When users need to store
data, they use a decryption algorithm to recov-
er the original data. The cloud is a medium for
downloading, uploading, writing, and reading
data. The blockchain layer can provide a pow-
erful abstraction for distributed protocols. The
operations performed in the cloud are recorded
by the blockchain. Once recorded by the block-
chain system, the data cannot be deleted or
tampered with. This is one of the most valuable
features of blockchain.
The proposed system model has the follow-
ing assumptions. First, the number of penetration
attacks on semi-honest users is at most (t – 1).
Second, there are less than (t – 1) colluding users
trying to decrypt the ciphertext, which means that
less than or equal to (t – 1) users cannot unscram-
ble the ciphertext. The following definitions are
used in the proposed model.
Definition 1: When decrypting data, each user
needs to provide a valid key value that is kept
secret from other users. Therefore, at least t users,
called a threshold, are needed to decrypt the
ciphertext collectively.
Definition 2: The NTRU cryptosystem is used
to encrypt and store user data in the cloud. The
data is then hashed and stored in the blockchain.
The encryption key is distributed to the P users,
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each of whom retains only his or her key. The
threshold algorithm reconstructs the decryption
key to recover the original data.
Definition 3: In the blockchain system, user
C uses the NTRU and cryptographic algorithm
to encrypt transaction information and give users
digital currency. Other users do not know wheth-
er the digital currency has been included in user
C’s account. Hence, payment privacy is also pro-
vided in the blockchain.
The design objectives of the privacy protection
of UAV big data are twofold. First, the mechanism
has high performance in security services, such as
key issuance and verification. Second, the execu-
tion times of storing data, releasing the key, and
verification are within a specified period.
dAtA ProtectIon PrIvAcy scheme
The proposed privacy protection scheme of UAV
big data is executed in four stages. In the first
stage, user data is encrypted. In the second stage,
files are uploaded and downloaded. In the third
stage, data is recorded in the blockchain, and user
data is read from the blockchain. In the fourth
stage, data is exchanged. The recording operation
in the third stage is the most crucial stage, which
contains two parts. The first part is the data block
of the blockchain, and the other part is the smart
contract.
To ensure that the recorded content is secure
in blocks, the hash value of the information is
stored in the corresponding blockchain structure.
Since the data in the blockchain is composed of
many message blocks, it is necessary to calculate
the Merkle root of the data block according to
the corresponding hash value algorithm. There-
fore, tampering with the data is not possible. The
message blocks processed in this way are natural-
ly advantageous in the P2P network, and the cost
of data verification can be significantly reduced.
PrIvAcy AnALysIs
As for the privacy protection of UAV big data, the
data should not be leaked. In the privacy protec-
tion of data, the data exchange is carried out only
between users and the data center. Information
is encrypted, and the NTRU password protection
mechanism is used in the blockchain system. The
protocol guarantees that other users cannot gain
any information about the encrypted data, and
the data center alone cannot decrypt the cipher-
text nor deduce the private key of each user.
Therefore, data privacy protection is provided,
and the privacy of the private keys of each user
is preserved.
In detail, only the ciphertexts are transmit-
ted, and they are only transmitted between the
user and the data center. If there is no collusion
between users, they will not be able to decrypt
the ciphertext because the (p, t) -threshold NTRU
cryptography system is used. Therefore, even
if some user or data center gets the ciphertext
for the sum Epk( Kk=1 k) , it cannot be decrypted
unless there is cooperation between t or more
users having their share of the private key.
K
Also, even if the data center has the  k=1k, it
cannot decrypt the ciphertext Epk(k) as the indi-
vidual private key  k is kept secret by each user.
Therefore, the privacy of each user’s private key
is well protected.
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1/29/21 4:16 PM
 Compatible X9.98
Optimal broadband
Security level Balance broadband
and speed The best broadband Max speed
and speed

Military level: 256-bit symmetric

NTRU_EES743EP1 NTRU_EES1087EP2 NTRU_EES1171EP1 NTRU_EES1499EP1
code/RSA-15360/ECC-512

Commercial level: 112-bit symmetric

NTRU_EES401EP2 NTRU_EES401EP1 NTRU_EES541EP1 NTRU_EES659EP1
code/RSA-2048/ECC-224

Industrial level: 128-bit symmetric

NTRU_EES439EP1 NTRU_EES449EP1 NTRU_EES613EP1 NTRU_EES761EP1
code/RSA-4096/ECC-256

192-bit symmetric code/RSA-7680/

NTRU_EES593EP1 NTRU_EES677EP1 NTRU_EES887EP1 NTRU_EES1087EP2
ECC-384
TABLE 1. NTRU parameters.

Performance Evaluation of Uav Big Data Parameter set

NTRU_ NTRU_ NTRU_
EES401EP2 EES439EP1 EES593EP1
Privacy Protection Scheme
The length of the public key 557 609 821
The Selection of the Key
The private key length 607 659 891
In this work, the NTRU cryptographic algo-
rithm is adopted to improve the performance Encryption and decryption speed 10638/8064 9900/7299 6849/4694
of the system without compromising data secu-
Key length 256 512 960
rity. Table 1 shows the parameters used in RSA
NTRU. These parameters are used to generate Encryption and decryption speed 3050/109 788/16 219/25
the keys. In this work, the key that is compat-
ible with X9.98 protocol and having the best Key length 28 32 48
ECC
broadband speed is selected experimentally, Encryption and decryption speed 686/951 439/650 184/285
and the NTRU key NTRU_EES401EP2, NTRU_
EES439EP1, and NTRU_EES593EP1 with the TABLE 2. NTRU key length and comparison.
corresponding security levels of 112 bits, 128
bits, and 192 bits are used. The lengths of keys, and 821 bytes are used. The time required for
and the execution speeds of RSA and ECC cryp- the homomorphic encryption of the NTRU public
tography are shown for corresponding NTRU key cryptosystem is evaluated. Six different cases
security levels in Table 2. of homomorphic encryptions are evaluated, as
shown in Fig. 4.
Key Generation and The following are the descriptions of the six
E ncryption and Decryption Performance Evaluation different cases: Case 1: homomorphic encryp-
After selecting the key, the performance of the tion of a single plaintext, Case 2: multiplicative
key generation is evaluated. In the NTRU crypto- homomorphic encryption after random encryp-
system, three public keys are generated accord- tion of two plaintexts, Case 3: two kinds of
ing to the sequence of the cryptosystem function random homomorphic encryption of a single
library. Their sizes are 557 bytes, 609 bytes, and plaintext, Case 4: polynomial homomorphic
821 bytes, respectively. Public and private keys encryption of a single plaintext, Case 5: addi-
are required in the process of encryption and tive homomorphic encryption of two plaintexts,
decryption. Figure 3 shows the generation time of and Case 6: multiplicative homomorphism
an NTRU key, the encryption time of NTRU, and encryption of two plaintexts. As shown in Fig.
the decryption time of NTRU for different lengths 4, the execution times of NTRU homomorphic
of the public key. To validate the result, two differ- encryption generally increase as the complex-
ent experiments were conducted for each group. ity of the homomorphic encryption increases.
The experiment result shows that the key gen- As expected, the time consumed by NTRU
eration time increases with the increase in key homomorphic encryptions increases with the
length. In NTRU, it is evident that the encryption increase in key length. We can also observe that
took longer than the decryption. The decryptions the time required for multiplicative homomor-
took less than 3 ms, while the encryptions took phic encryption is shorter than that for additive
more than 4 ms. In decryption, the difference in homomorphic encryption. Therefore, the exper-
the execution time between 557 bytes and 821 imental results show that the proposed privacy
bytes is only 1.5 ms, and the difference between protection mechanism of UAV big data has high
609 bytes and 821 bytes is negligible. Therefore, security performance.
the comparison results demonstrate the high
encryption and decryption efficiency of the NTRU Conclusions
cryptosystem. With the massive growth of data, new data infor-
mation security problems have been emerging.
Analysis of Homomorphic Encryption of the With the development of UAVs, the privacy
NTRU Cryptosystem need of UAV big data information is inevitable.
In addition, an analysis of homomorphic encryp- Therefore, in this work, blockchain technology
tion for the NTRU cryptosystem is presented. is adopted to solve the big data privacy prob-
The public key lengths of 557 bytes, 609 bytes, lem of UAVs. The privacy analysis is presented to

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FIGURE 4. Homomorphic encryption time of NTRU.
show that the proposed threshold scheme effec-
tively protects the privacy of data and user keys.
The performance evaluation results show that
the scheme is effective at generating keys and
executing encryptions/decryptions. Moreover,
the homomorphic property of the NTRU crypto-
system shows that the proposed scheme provides
good security performance. We believe that the
work has good theoretical significance for the
privacy protection of UAV big data. In addition,
we expect that the presented work can give
insights into providing a good practical idea for
the research of blockchain technology in UAV
data protection.
Acknowledgment
The authors are grateful to the Deanship of Sci-
entific Research at King Saud University, Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, for funding this work through the
Vice Deanship of Scientific Research Chairs: Chair
of Pervasive and Mobile Computing.
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Biographies
Zhihan Lv [SM’19] is currently an associate professor at Qingd-
ao University, China. He was an assistant professor at Shenzhen
Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sci-
ences from 2012 to 2016. He received his Ph.D. from Ocean
University of China and Paris7 University in 2012. He worked
at CNRS, France, as a research engineer; Umea University,
Sweden, as a postdoctoral research fellow; Fundacion FIVAN,
Spain, as an experienced researcher; University College London,
United Kingdom, as a research associate; and the University of
Barcelona, Spain, as a postdoctoral researcher. He was a Marie
Curie Fellow in the European Union’s Seventh Framework Pro-
gram LANPERCEPT. His research mainly focuses on the Internet
of Things, blockchain, multimedia, augmented reality, virtual
reality, computer vision, 3D visualization and graphics, serious
games, HCI, big data, and GIS. He has contributed 200+ papers
in the related fields on journals such as IEEE TII, IEEE TITS, IEEE
TFS, ACM TOMM, ACM TOIT, and ACM TIST, among others, and
conferences such as ACM MM, ACM CHI, ACM Siggraph Asia,
ICCV, and IEEE Virtual Reality. He is an Associate Editor of Plos
one (since 2016), IEEE Access (since 2016), Neurocomputing
(2016–2018), and IET Image Processing (since 2017). He has
been lead Guest Editor of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Infor-
matics, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems,
IEEE Network, IEEE Sensors, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine,
and Future Generation Computer Systems. He was a Program
Committee member of ACM IUI2015, 2016, 2019, and 2020,
IEEE CHASE Workshop on BIGDATA4HEALTH 2016, 2017,
IEEE/CIC WIN Workshop 2016, IIKI2016 2019, WASA2016,
2017, IEEE PDGC2016, ACM SAC2017-WCN Track, and more.
Liang Qiao [S’20] is currently a graduate student in the School
of Data Science and Software Engineering at Qingdao Universi-
ty. His research interests include machine learning, blockchain,
and virtual reality. In 2019, he obtained a bachelor’s degree
from Qingdao University. In 2018, he won the second prize of
the National Software and Information Technology Competition
in China. He has rich experience in algorithm design.
M. Shamim Hossain [SM’09] (mshossain@ksu. edu.sa), corre-
sponding author, is currently a professor with the Chair of Per-

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 vasive and Mobile Computing and the Department of Software
Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences,
King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His research inter-
ests include cloud networking, smart environment (smart city,
smart health), AI, deep learning, edge computing, the Internet
of Things (IoT), multimedia for health care, and multimedia big
data. He has authored and co authored more than 300 pub-
lications. He is on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on
Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia, IEEE Network, IEEE Wireless Com-
munications, IEEE Access, the Journal of Network and Computer
Applications, and the International Journal of Multimedia Tools
and Applications. He is a Senior Member of ACM. He is an IEEE
ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer for 2021–2022.
IEEE Network • January/February 2021
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Bong Jun Choi [M] is an associate professor at the School of
Computer Science & Engineering and jointly at the School of Elec-
tronic Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea. Previously,
he was an assistant professor at the Department of Computer
Science, State University of New York Korea, and concurrently
a research assistant professor with the Department of Comput-
er Science, Stony Brook University, New York. He received his
B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Yonsei University, Korea, both in
electrical and electronics engineering, and his Ph.D. degree from
the University of Waterloo, Canada, in electrical and computer
engineering. His current research focuses on energy-efficient net-
works, distributed mobile wireless networks, smart grid communi-
cations, and network security. He is a member of ACM.
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