Smart cities are increasingly relying on information and communication technologies to cope with today's challenges, including increasing population, heterogeneous economic growth, and environmental legislation hardening. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) generates a growing interest in coping with such challenges, along with new business opportunities. As a result, it is expected to see the number of drone-based applications to rise at a very fast pace, entailing new cybersecurity risks to emerge. In this paper, we propose to tackle the problem of secure communication among untrusting parties with a certificateless-group authenticated key agreement (CL-GAKA) scheme. The intent is to enable confidentiality, message integrity, and authenticity in UAV-to-UAV communication. Provisioning untrusted UAV networks with trusted communication will provide ground for further research and applications, such as collaborative cybersecurity deterrence, network extension using trusted relay nodes, collaborative mission exercise in time-critical applications, or anonymous communication for user privacy. Moreover, in order to fill the gap of technology awareness, we provide an implementation and demonstrate that the generation of a session key between two users can be performed in approximately 600ms on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ system-on-chip (1.4GHz Cortex-A53). Finally, the protocol is formally evaluated with the Scyther tool.
Smart cities are increasingly relying on information and communication technologies to cope with today's challenges, including increasing population, heterogeneous economic growth, and environmental legislation hardening. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) generates a growing interest in coping with such challenges, along with new business opportunities. As a result, it is expected to see the number of drone-based applications to rise at a very fast pace, entailing new cybersecurity risks to emerge. In this paper, we propose to tackle the problem of secure communication among untrusting parties with a certificateless-group authenticated key agreement (CL-GAKA) scheme. The intent is to enable confidentiality, message integrity, and authenticity in UAV-to-UAV communication. Provisioning untrusted UAV networks with trusted communication will provide ground for further research and applications, such as collaborative cybersecurity deterrence, network extension using trusted relay nodes, collaborative mission exercise in time-critical applications, or anonymous communication for user privacy. Moreover, in order to fill the gap of technology awareness, we provide an implementation and demonstrate that the generation of a session key between two users can be performed in approximately 600ms on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ system-on-chip (1.4GHz Cortex-A53). Finally, the protocol is formally evaluated with the Scyther tool.
The technology of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has evolved and contributed to improving road safety and traffic efficiency in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). ITS applications are dependent on a communication network formed between AVs and UAVs suffer from security and privacy issues owing to vulnerable wireless communication channels. Considering these issues, SP2AP, a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based efficient and reliable privacy-preserving authentication protocol for secure UAV-UAV communications in IoT systems is presented in this paper. The proposed protocol not only offers anonymity and untraceability features but also mitigates UAV capture attacks. A robust informal security analysis confirms that the SP2AP protocol safeguards against various known security attacks, such as masquerade, Man-In- The-Middle (MITM), Ephemeral Secret Leakage (ESL), replay, node tampering, cloning, etc. The proposed protocol offers other security features, including mutual authentication, secure key agreement, no clock synchronization, user anonymity, untraceability, (for/back)ward secrecy, property, and drone-to-drone direct authentication. The formal security proof is performed using the Real-OR-Random (ROR) model, and the Scyther tool also demonstrates that the SP2AP protocol is more robust in terms of security and privacy. Performance analysis evaluates computation and communication costs, which show better superiority compared to similar existing protocols.
With the continuous development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies, secure authentication in cross-domain collaborative operations has become increasingly crucial. To address the persistent challenges of certificate management and key escrow in traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Identity-Based Public Key Cryptography (IB-PKC) systems, this paper proposes a novel cross-domain authentication protocol for UAVs that integrates Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC) with Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). The protocol utilizes Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to enable efficient key agreement while avoiding computationally intensive bilinear pairing operations, making it particularly suitable for resource-constrained UAV platforms. The incorporation of PUF enhances physical security and provides robust identity binding for terminal devices. Formal security analysis under the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption, complemented by comprehensive verification using ProVerif, demonstrates the protocol's resilience against both active and passive attacks. Performance evaluation results confirm that the proposed protocol achieves superior communication and computational efficiency compared to existing schemes, establishing its practical applicability in dynamic multi-domain UAV collaborative environments.
Abstract With the advancement of information technology and the reduction of costs, the application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has gradually expanded from the military field to the industrial field and civilian field. It brings great convenience to people in surveillance, detection, transportation, emergency rescue etc. However, UAVs usually work in harsh natural environments, and their communication security confronts various challenges. Due to UAVs' limited resources, such as computing capability, storage space, and energy, traditional security protection schemes based on complex cryptographic algorithms are not suitable for UAV systems directly. Therefore, a two‐stage lightweight identity authentication and key agreement protocol for UAV is proposed in this paper. The entire process only uses hash and XOR operations, which significantly improves the authentication efficiency. Simultaneously, the physical unclonable function (PUF) is introduced and embedded into the UAV hardware to ensure UAV network communication security when a UAV suffers a physical capture attack. In the paper, the security of the proposed protocol is proved with Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, Real‐or‐Random (ROR) model, and AVISPA simulation tools. An informal security analysis is also provided to illustrate that the protocol satisfies the security requirements of UAV networks. Finally, the protocol is compared with other existing protocols regarding function properties, computation cost, and communication cost, which shows that the proposed protocol has effectiveness and practicality.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled intelligent systems are emerging and empowering real-time monitoring and modeling tasks. The security requirements in real-time UAV-enabled intelligent systems are data integrity, authenticity, traceability, tamper-proofing, and privacy. A secure channel established by authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol can cover all the security requirements. However, no UDP-based lightweight pairing-free AKA protocol has been proposed for the UAV system. In this article, we propose a UDP-compatible Curve25519-infrastructural identity-based end-to-end pre-AKA protocol (UDP-IBE2E-pAKA) with system auto-upgrading and direct and lifecycle credential revocation as a lightweight and reliable UDP-based secure communication module for UAV-enabled networks, which perfectly fits the rapid mobility and extremely harsh work environments of UAVs. To protect UAV-enabled systems stable from DDoS attacks, we construct an efficient identity-based signature as a preauthentication mechanism for the verifier to directly authenticate the sender without any redundant operations. In addition, to prevent the corrupted UAV from monitoring and disrupting attacks, our protocol can revoke the malicious entities directly and immediately with a revocation list in the authentication phase. Moreover, online mode auto-upgradable algorithms are designed to achieve key exposure resistance in our protocol. The full proof of the authenticity and privacy are given in this article. The comprehensive comparison with other state-of-the-art end-to-end AKA protocols indicates that our protocol meets the most robustness and highest efficiency on Raspberry Pi 5.
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network serves as the core infrastructure of the future low-altitude intelligent network, providing flexible aerial smart services for various industries through inter-UAV collaboration and ground-air connectivity. With the advancement of quantum computing, quantum algorithms pose a serious threat to UAV communication networks. Traditional authentication protocols based on classical number-theoretic problems are no longer secure against quantum attacks. To address the challenges of quantum threats and the inherent characteristics of UAVs, such as high mobility and resource constraints, this paper proposes a quantum resistant authentication and key agreement protocol for UAV networks. The comprehensive informal security analysis demonstrates the robustness of the protocol against various attacks, particularly attacks based on quantum computing. Furthermore, the authentication component of the protocol adopts a lightweight design, reducing computational overhead by up to 53.57%, thereby balancing security and efficiency.
With the widespread deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both military and civilian domains, the demand for secure and encrypted communications in UAV networks integrated with ground stations has become increasingly prominent. Authentication and key agreement protocols are widely regarded as essential technical mechanisms for ensuring the security of data transmission in wireless communication environments. However, the rapid advancement of quantum computing technologies poses potential security threats to conventional protocols based on elliptic curve cryptography. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a quantum-secure authentication and key agreement protocol tailored for UAV–ground station communication scenarios. By incorporating Crystal-Kyber, the proposed protocol ensures quantum resistance while striving to minimize system computational overhead. The results of the informal security analysis indicate that the proposed protocol can effectively withstand a variety of known attacks. In addition, comprehensive comparative evaluations with existing related protocols demonstrate that, while maintaining low computational overhead, the proposed scheme exhibits stronger robustness in terms of security and functional properties.