Ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of telemetry data in the operation of unmanned vehicles in mobile communication networks

Abstract

Carrying unmanned-vehicle telemetry over a public mobile network binds confidentiality and integrity requirements to transport constraints. Cryptographic service fields lengthen the protected frame, a longer frame is split into more fragments, and the loss of one fragment costs the receiver an entire protected portion of telemetry. The study asks how tag length, aggregation depth, key change period and transport block size jointly govern the residual risk of a telemetry stream. Residual risk is computed analytically across five profiles of cryptographic frame protection by a reproducible offline program. The modelling unit is a protected telemetry frame; the five profiles differ in tag length, counter nonce, service header, aggregation depth and key change period, and are evaluated over nine inputs with disclosed ranges. Residual risk counts the records per session that either fail to reach the receiver with verified integrity or are accepted as authentic while injected. The lowest computed residual risk equals 7.200 records. The aggregating profile yields 14.397 records, and the relative spread across the five profiles reaches 99,96%. Aggregation stays free of fragmentation up to 16 records per frame. The binding constraint lies in the ratio between protected frame size and transport block size rather than in tag length. The injection component amounts to 0.290% of the residual risk of the truncated-tag profile, and the two components equalise only at 17.18 million injection attempts per second, well beyond the throughput of the radio interface considered here.