Replay attacks on drone command links are not theoretical. A ground station sends ARM at timestamp T. An adversary records the packet. Thirty seconds later they retransmit it verbatim. If the drone accepts it, you have a serious problem — and in a jammed or contested environment, the attacker can do this silently.
The standard defense is a monotonically increasing nonce: every packet carries a counter, and the receiver only accepts packets with counters strictly greater than the last accepted value. Simple in concept. The implementation details are where things get interesting.
This post walks through the nonce design in .
CleitonQ is a post-quantum authentication layer for MAVLink v2, combining ML-KEM-1024 (FIPS 203) for session establishment and ML-DSA-87 (FIPS 204) for command signing. A formal security model in ProVerif 2.05 verifies session key secrecy (Q1) and command authenticity (Q2) against a Dolev-Yao attacker. Paper on Zenodo.
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