A Combined Video and Telemetry Encryption Architecture for UAVs with FPGA

This work presents a novel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based architecture for encrypting telemetry together with high-definition video data in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The design uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-128) to secure data and video streams, ensuring protection against cyberattacks. The proposed system integrates a pipeline data path for video and telemetry data, coupled with FIFO buffers, enabling efficient handling of different bandwidth requirements while maintaining high throughput. Our platform encrypts/decrypts both down-stream and up-stream telemetry data and encrypts down-stream of video data. To the best of our knowledge, no such architecture has been proposed in the literature, as existing research focus on encrypting only a part of the aforementioned types of data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture performs efficiently without adding serious execution delays comparing to existing FPGA platforms, while keeping energy consumption low.