Date of Award

5-2025

Degree Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Committee Chair

Dr. Ahmed Sherif

Committee Chair School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Committee Member 2

Dr. Sarah Lee

Committee Member 2 School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Committee Member 3

Dr. Nick Rahimi

Committee Member 3 School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Abstract

The development of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) drones signifies a substantial advancement in urban air mobility, ready to transform transportation models in densely populated regions. These advanced drones, distinguished by their capacity to function in limited spaces and their minimized environmental impact, are set to transform individual, shipping, emergency services, and public safety activities. Nonetheless, like any transformational technology, the implementation of eVTOL systems presents many challenges, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Adding many devices and entities to an eVTOL network increases the risk of privacy and security attacks. This paper proposes a key-based authentication scheme that utilizes Chebyshev polynomials as chaotic maps, hash functions, and the AES-256 encryption technique. The network members can securely generate all encryption keys without sharing secret data, which solves one of the main problems of the symmetric encryption scheme in the authentication service. In addition, compared with other schemes that depend on current keys to generate future keys, this proposed scheme can work in parallel and generate all the required keys for the same eVTOL drone at the same time. The security and privacy analysis shows that this scheme achieves the required features identified in the design goals. The results showed that this scheme has less computation and communication overhead when compared to other existing schemes.

ORCID ID

https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1916-6572

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Available for download on Monday, September 01, 2025

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