Data Hiding in Flying Ad Hoc Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are gaining popularity in recent years in both military and civilian domains. Multiple UAVs can now be deployed together to increase flexibility and area of coverage, to form a Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET). These networks are highly susceptible to security threats and contain nodes that are constrained in terms of storage space, computational power and battery life, making the execution of typical security strategies difficult. This thesis explores security solutions for FANET using data hiding, which is a lightweight alternative to cryptography, and exploits different aspects of network packet streams to transmit messages covertly.