Secure and Efficient Cluster Head Election in a UAVAided Wireless Sensor Network In a UAVaided WSN (Wireless Sensor Network), a UAV makes data collection work energyefficient and completed rapidly. In a UAVaided WSN, CHs (Cluster Heads) take charge of a crucial role such as gathering data from members and delivering the gathered data to a UAV. Such an important and critical role of CHs makes attackers enthusiastic in turning their compromised nodes to CHs. In the general CH election framework, each node determines its CH role by itself, and this allows a compromised node to become a CH even if it is a disqualified node. This paper presents a UAVaided CH election framework where a UAV gathers residual energy of nodes and delivers them to the sink, which elects new CHs or disqualified candidates and delivers the new CHs or the disqualified candidates to the network. As depicted in simulation results, the UAVaided CH election framework significantly diminishes CH elections of compromised nodes and corrupted messages per second. In addition, the UAVaided CH election framework hugely diminishes energy consumption of nodes, and extends both lifetime of nodes and network lifetime. An important future work item is to implement other CH election protocols under out CH election framework, and to compare them in terms of security and performance.

Authentication Methods for UAV Communication Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) are being employed in many different applications, and with the increased usage security concerns become more accentuated. Communication links are core components of a UAS, and providing a secure communication channel is a necessity in which Authentication strategies play a major role. However, resourceconstrained devices cannot adopt offtheshelf security strategies that were not developed taking into account those devicesxe2x80x99 constraints. Because of that, new security strategies, including authentication, were purposed for these applications. In this paper, we analyze and compare two authentication protocols developed for WSNs and modified for UAV usage. Tests were performed analyzing time execution and CPU usage on securityspecific operation such as hash tables and elliptic curve operations.