Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a critical role in various fields, including logistics, agriculture, and rescue operations. Effective identity authentication and key agreement schemes are vital for UAV networks to combat threats. Current schemes often employ algorithms like elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA), which are vulnerable to quantum attacks. To address this issue, we propose LIGKYX, a novel scheme combining the quantum-resistant Kyber algorithm with the hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) for enhanced security and efficiency. This scheme enables the mutual authentication between UAVs and ground stations and supports secure session key establishment protocols. Additionally, it facilitates robust authentication and key agreement among UAVs through control stations, addressing the critical challenge of quantum-resistant security in UAV networks. The proposed LIGKYX scheme operates based on the Kyber algorithm and elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) key exchange protocol, employing the HMAC and pre-computation techniques. Furthermore, a formal verification tool validated the security of LIGKYX under the Dolev–Yao threat model. Comparative analyses on security properties, communication overhead, and computational overhead indicate that LIGKYX not only matches or exceeds existing schemes but also uniquely counters quantum attacks effectively, ensuring the security of UAV communication networks with a lower time overhead for authentication and communication.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a critical role in various fields, including logistics, agriculture, and rescue operations. Effective identity authentication and key agreement schemes are vital for UAV networks to combat threats. Current schemes often employ algorithms like elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA), which are vulnerable to quantum attacks. To address this issue, we propose LIGKYX, a novel scheme combining the quantum-resistant Kyber algorithm with the hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) for enhanced security and efficiency. This scheme enables the mutual authentication between UAVs and ground stations and supports secure session key establishment protocols. Additionally, it facilitates robust authentication and key agreement among UAVs through control stations, addressing the critical challenge of quantum-resistant security in UAV networks. The proposed LIGKYX scheme operates based on the Kyber algorithm and elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) key exchange protocol, employing the HMAC and pre-computation techniques. Furthermore, a formal verification tool validated the security of LIGKYX under the Dolev–Yao threat model. Comparative analyses on security properties, communication overhead, and computational overhead indicate that LIGKYX not only matches or exceeds existing schemes but also uniquely counters quantum attacks effectively, ensuring the security of UAV communication networks with a lower time overhead for authentication and communication.
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.
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.
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 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 rapid advance of manufacturing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, aka drones) has led to a rise in the use of their civilian and commercial applications. The access of these drones to controlled airspace can be efficiently coordinated through particular layered network architecture, often referred to as the Internet-of-Drones (IoD). The nature of IoD, which is deployed in an open-access environment, brings significant safety and security concerns. Classical cryptosystems such as elliptic curve cryptography, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, and Diffie-Hellman are essential building blocks to secure communication in the IoD. However, with the rapid development of quantum computing, it will be easy to break public-key cryptosystems using efficient quantum algorithms like Shor’s algorithm. Thus, building quantum-safe solutions to enhance IoD security has become imperative. Fortunately, quantum technologies can provide unconditional security solutions to protect data and communications in the IoD environment. This paper proposes a quantum-based scheme to prevent unauthorized drones from accessing a specific flight zone and authenticates the identities and shared secret messages of involved entities. To do so, we used a quantum channel to encode the private information based on a pre-shared key and a random key generated in session. The involved entities also perform mutual authentication and share a secret key. We also provide the security proofs and analysis of the proposed scheme that indicates its resistance to well-known attacks.
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%.