# A Trusted Lightweight Communication Strategy for Flying Named Data Networking
## 1 Introduction  
Flying ad-hoc network (FANET) employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as nodes is a new breed of Self-Organized Networks (SONs) offering a plethora of innovative and exciting applications including, but not limited to, Disaster Management [1] and public safety insurance [2]. Without lossof generality, like other breeds of SONs, FANET applications are also based on cooperation-aware communication where information is exchanged among communicating nodes. This phenomenon advocates for content-centric communication paradigm for FANET applications where the information is of the essence than the source and/or location of information. As a result, owing to the Future Internet Architecture (FIA), recently content-centric networking (CCN) and named data networking (NDN) have been considered to be the architectural backbones for SONs and its breeds, such as VANET-based and FANET-based clouds [3; 4] and flying social networks [5]; however, this paper only focuses on FANET. Among other challenges for most of SONs and mainly FANETs, security and privacy are two of the most daunting challenges due to several reasons such as resource-constraints, mobility, stringent delay requirements, and so forth. These characteristics make FANET more susceptible to security attacks. To date, security and privacy issues related to FANET have not been given ample attention in the literature and need thorough investigation. Owing to the nature of FANET applications, security of the content and its communication through the network are of paramount importance and prone to content-related attacks. To this end, several solutions have been proposed to secure the content communication and guarantee trusted delivery of the exchanged messages [6; 7]. Nevertheless, finding a balanced trade-off among security, efficiency, and the network requirements is still an open challenge. Security solutions for SONs communication including FANET can be divided into two categories: trust-based solutions [8] and cryptography-based solutions [9]. Traditionally, FANET applications require content/data exchange among the network entities where the location of content producer(s) and/or provider(s) is of least importance. Therefore, NDN can be the key enabler for the realization of FANET application that not only enriches the applications space but also aids in solving the traditional problems faced by traditional TCP/IP-based networks such as mobility management, addressing, reliability, and security [10]. However, NDN suffers from new security issues such as interest flooding, cache poisoning, access control, and data authenticity, to name a few [11]. Existing solutions in the literature consider traditional security approaches adopted in the vanilla NDN for fixed or wired networks [12; 13]. In the current solutions, the content is signed by the producer and then by the authority that issued the certificate to the producer. The certificate signing is continued in the chain of trust until it reaches a self-signed network entity (conventionally trusted authority). This mechanism of verifying and ensuring the data authenticity aids in improving the data trustworthiness. However, in a highly dynamic and energy-restricted FANET environment, it incurs a huge overhead which is unacceptable for the delay-sensitive and bandwidth and energy consuming applications [14]. To this end, a trusted lightweight communication architecture respecting both the NDN security principles and FANET features is essential. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to propose an efficient and lightweight trust-aided communication mechanism for FNDN where trust evaluation aids the data authenticity. To fill the voids, we propose a new Monitor-based communication architecture for FNDN that reduces the authentication processing delays and bandwidth consumption for the inter-UAV communications. The proposed mechanism maintains the similar vanilla NDN authentication process for the data forwarded through the designated Ground Stations.