Abstract: The popularity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in various fields has been rising recently. UAV technology is being invested in by numerous industries in order to cut expenses and increase efficiency. Therefore, UAVs are predicted to become much more important in the future. As UAVs become more popular, the risk of cyberattacks on them is also growing. One type of cyberattack involves the exposure of important flight data. This, in turn, can lead to serious problems. To address this problem, a new method based on lightweight cryptography and steganography is proposed in this work. The proposed method ensures multilayer protection of important UAV flight data. This is achieved by two layers of encryption using a polyalphabetic substitution cipher and ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated encryption, as well as randomized least significant bit (LSB) steganography. Most importantly, through this work, a balance is kept between security and performance. Additionally, all experiments are carried out on real devices, making the proposed method more practical. The proposed method is evaluated using MSE, PSNR, and SSIM metrics. Even with a capacity of 8000 bytes, it achieves an MSE of 0.04, a PSNR of 62, and an SSIM of 0.9998. It is then compared to existing methods. The results show better practical use, stronger security, and higher overall performance.

Orkhan Valikhanli and Fargana Abdullayeva. “Securing UAV Flight Data Using Lightweight Cryptography and Image Steganography”. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA) 16.5 (2025). http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160527

@article{Valikhanli2025,
title = {Securing UAV Flight Data Using Lightweight Cryptography and Image Steganography},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160527},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160527},
year = {2025},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {16},
number = {5},
author = {Orkhan Valikhanli and Fargana Abdullayeva}
}