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.
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.
Secure communication in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks is critical for a wide range of civil and military applications, from precision agriculture and disaster response to critical infrastructure monitoring. These missions require lightweight, tamper-resistant, and quantum-secure authentication mechanisms. We examine the recently proposed Quantum-Resistant Identity Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for UAV Networks Based on the Kyber Algorithm (LIGKYX) and demonstrate its critical weaknesses, including a lack of Perfect Forward/Backward Secrecy (PFS/PBS), and desynchronization vulnerabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a novel authentication and key agreement protocol that integrates SRAM-based Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) with the Kyber post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism, eliminating the reliance on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and stateful counters used in LIGKYX. The security of the proposed protocol is validated through both formal and informal analyses, demonstrating strong resistance to replay, impersonation, man-in-the-middle, desynchronization, and UAV capture attacks. Performance evaluation confirms its efficiency: the total communication overhead is reduced by 7.1% (from 1836 bytes in LIGKYX to 1705 bytes in the proposed scheme), and the total authentication time is reduced by more than 54%, from 87.84 ms in LIGKYX to 40.23 ms in the proposed scheme. These improvements demonstrate that the protocol not only strengthens security but also significantly reduces computation and communication costs. Overall, the proposed solution offers a lightweight, scalable, and quantum-resistant authentication framework tailored for resource-constrained UAV environments, representing a substantial advancement over existing schemes such as LIGKYX.
As the core subject of IoT applications, IoT devices have faced numerous security challenges. Especially for IoT devices deployed in remote or harsh environments, they are often unattended for long periods, making it difficult to share the sensing data and susceptible to potential physical attacks. While aerial assistance methods represented by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can solve the problem of data sharing at a low cost, it is necessary to establish a secure channel between ground control stations, UAVs, and IoT devices due to the sensitivity of the sensing data. Recently, Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) has been proven to provide unique identity identification for devices using its tamper-proof feature. In this paper, we propose a lightweight UAV-assisted authentication and key agreement protocol for unattended IoT devices, ensuring secure communication and physical tamper-proof requirements. However, our work does not stop there. We noticed that some existing PUF-based authentication schemes misunderstand the ability of PUF, which leads to these schemes cannot actually provide physical protection. We analyzed the security vulnerabilities of these schemes and proposed rules that should be followed when designing authentication protocols using PUF. In addition, for the first time, we put forward the formal definitions and proof methods for PUF in the formal proof of the security protocol, which avoided the unreasonable initial assumptions adopted in the proof of the existing schemes. We extended Mao-Boyd (MB) logic and comprehensively analyzed the proposed protocol. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, and the results show that the proposed scheme has certain advantages in communication and computation overhead compared with existing schemes.
With the rapid development of integrated vehicle-road-cloud systems, RoadSide Units (RSUs) have become crucial for communication in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). However, RSU failures disrupt real-time vehicle-to-cloud connectivity, exacerbating traffic congestion and safety risks. Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a promising solution for temporary mobile base stations due to their rapid deployment and flexibility. Nevertheless, the open and dynamic nature of UAV-vehicle communication networks presents critical challenges in achieving both secure communication and lightweight authentication. Furthermore, the unsupervised deployment environment of UAVs makes them particularly vulnerable to physical attacks. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a secure and lightweight UAV-assisted vehicle authentication scheme based on quantum key. The scheme leverages quantum keys, hash functions and XOR to ensure secrecy and traceability of malicious entities. Utilising the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and fuzzy extractor to resist physical attacks. A private blockchain architecture is implemented for secure data storage and management. We verify the scheme’s security using the real-or-random (ROR) oracle model and the Scyther tool. The experimental results show that, compared to other schemes, our scheme has a lower overhead, with an average packet loss rate reduction of 11.42% – 28.8% and an average communication delay reduction of 14.41%–63%.
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.
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.