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Advanced sciences and technologies for security applications

Strengthening Security Mechanisms of Satellites and UAVs Against Possible Attacks from Quantum Computers

Osama Akram Amin Metwally Hussien, Isuru Sandakelum Will Arachchige, Hamid Jahankhani

Published Jan 1, 2024• 7 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-47594-8_1

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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.
Side channel attacks pose a security threat to aerospace and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially in defense scenarios where ensuring resilience and safeguarding data confidentiality is of utmost importance. These attacks take advantage of information leaks like power usage patterns, electromagnetic emissions, timing fluctuations, and sound signals to steal cryptographic keys and sensor data or control instructions. Due to the increasing complexity of these attacks, it is crucial to assess the current mitigation methods to find effective defense tactics and steer future research in the right direction. This survey consolidates and analyzes diverse strategies to enhance security measures such as encryption safeguards, hardwarebased protections, obscuring software code, AI-powered anomaly detection, and shielding signals. In this study, the balance among security needs, computational performance, and system limitations is provided by highlighting a review of current options. Furthermore, we highlight research obstacles and upcoming paths like quantum-proof encryption methods, advanced artificial intelligence-powered intrusion detection, and innovative protective measures to strengthen the durability of future aerospace and UAV defense systems against new side channel risks. By amalgamating existing progress, this analysis offers valuable perspective for researchers, technicians, and decision-makers striving to create stronger security infrastructures.
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.