Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become the preferred tool for terrain exploration due to their aerial perspective and maneuverability. Communication security between parties is ensured through the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol. Traditional terrain exploration data processing relies on large-scale data centers, which suffer from inconvenient setup and insufficient real-time capabilities. Existing AKA protocols are susceptible to physical attacks and machine learning attacks, and they also suffer from high overhead and single-point-of-failure issues. To address these challenges, we propose a three factors authentication and key agreement protocol for UAVs-assisted terrain exploration. Specifically, we design an elliptic curve cryptography-based AKA framework to avoid single-point-of-failure issues at ground control stations, ensuring the security of the entire AKA process. Using portable terminals as fog nodes to serve as data transit stations, addressing the issues of inconvenient data center setup and insufficient real-time performance. During the login phase, three-factor authentication combining passwords, biometric features, and smart cards ensures the legitimacy of user identities. The physical properties of physically unclonable function (PUF) are utilized to resist physical attacks. Use reconfigurable PUF to update responses and resist machine learning attacks. We use the ROR model, informal security analysis, and ProVerif tool to rigorously verify our scheme. The results indicate the protocol can resist various attacks. Finally, compared to existing protocols, U2D and U2U achieve computational efficiency improvements of 56.9% and 33.4%, respectively, while reducing communication overhead by 38.1% and 28.0%, and lowering energy consumption by 24.5% and 39.2%, simultaneously, they against physical attacks and machine learning attacks, significantly enhancing security.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become the preferred tool for terrain exploration due to their aerial perspective and maneuverability. Communication security between parties is ensured through the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol. Traditional terrain exploration data processing relies on large-scale data centers, which suffer from inconvenient setup and insufficient real-time capabilities. Existing AKA protocols are susceptible to physical attacks and machine learning attacks, and they also suffer from high overhead and single-point-of-failure issues. To address these challenges, we propose a three factors authentication and key agreement protocol for UAVs-assisted terrain exploration. Specifically, we design an elliptic curve cryptography-based AKA framework to avoid single-point-of-failure issues at ground control stations, ensuring the security of the entire AKA process. Using portable terminals as fog nodes to serve as data transit stations, addressing the issues of inconvenient data center setup and insufficient real-time performance. During the login phase, three-factor authentication combining passwords, biometric features, and smart cards ensures the legitimacy of user identities. The physical properties of physically unclonable function (PUF) are utilized to resist physical attacks. Use reconfigurable PUF to update responses and resist machine learning attacks. We use the ROR model, informal security analysis, and ProVerif tool to rigorously verify our scheme. The results indicate the protocol can resist various attacks. Finally, compared to existing protocols, U2D and U2U achieve computational efficiency improvements of 56.9% and 33.4%, respectively, while reducing communication overhead by 38.1% and 28.0%, and lowering energy consumption by 24.5% and 39.2%, simultaneously, they against physical attacks and machine learning attacks, significantly enhancing security.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.