This paper introduces a novel post-quantum mutual authentication scheme for drones, leveraging Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and cryptographic accumulators. By integrating PUFs, the scheme effectively mitigates drone cloning risks, while lattice-based cryptography ensures resilience against quantum computing attacks. The proposed approach enables secure, direct mutual authentication between drones without intermediaries. Cryptographic accumulators compress the entire drone identity database into a single element, significantly reducing storage demands on individual drones. The proposed scheme achieves superior communication efficiency compared to existing PUF-based post-quantum protocols for drones. Formal security verification using ProVerif confirms the robustness of the proposed scheme.
This paper introduces a novel post-quantum mutual authentication scheme for drones, leveraging Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and cryptographic accumulators. By integrating PUFs, the scheme effectively mitigates drone cloning risks, while lattice-based cryptography ensures resilience against quantum computing attacks. The proposed approach enables secure, direct mutual authentication between drones without intermediaries. Cryptographic accumulators compress the entire drone identity database into a single element, significantly reducing storage demands on individual drones. The proposed scheme achieves superior communication efficiency compared to existing PUF-based post-quantum protocols for drones. Formal security verification using ProVerif confirms the robustness of the proposed scheme.
Modern societies increasingly rely on interconnected devices and individuals for information exchange and monitoring. In this manner, drones, as flying smart nodes in the wireless network ecosystem, facilitate diverse applications, such as industrial, civilian, and disaster response operations. However, the widespread adoption of drone networks introduces significant challenges regarding interoperability, privacy, and security. Advances in quantum computing exacerbate these issues by rendering classical cryptographic measures inadequate, necessitating the adoption of quantum-safe approaches. Existing solutions fail to address all potential threats or lack post-quantum security. This work sets out to propose a robust lattice-based authentication and communication protocol for drone networks, addressing these challenges. The protocol integrates dynamic credentials, timestamps, multi-factor authentication, and context information to enhance security. The scheme's security is analyzed using the DY and BPR models and formally verified via the AVISPA tool. Performance evaluations and comparisons with existing solutions demonstrate the protocol's functionality, showcasing a reasonable trade-off between security and performance. By leveraging modern cryptographic techniques, the proposed scheme ensures reliable and robust drone operations, effectively mitigating various attacks beyond session establishment while safeguarding privacy, and supporting dynamic network events.
The use of drones in military operations is a growing phenomenon that presents substantial security implications, especially related to authentication, data integrity, and the treatment of cyber threats. While traditional schemes like Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) have computational efficiency, they are susceptible to quantum attacks. To solve the aforementioned problem, in this paper, we design a Lightweight and Quantum Resistant Authentication Protocol for Military IoD Using Dilithium Signatures, which is a post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) method implemented using the PQC solution based on lattice-based cryptographic evidence. The proposed protocol provides quantum-safe mutual authentication of drones, soldiers, and the command center (CC) while also protecting against impersonation attacks and side-channel attacks. In contrast to ECC-based authentication and its vulnerability to Shor’s Algorithm, the proposed system is long-term quantum secure. While Dilithium incurs increased computational and communication costs, our performance evaluations show that it provides security against quantum adversaries and replay attacks, thereby deeming it a worthwhile choice, especially in light of the swift advancements in ASIC technology. In an effort to be truly efficient, signature compression, parallel authentication verification, and an improved key management approach further enhance the scalability of the proposed scheme in the military Internet of Drones (IoD) network. The results substantiate the necessity of deploying full post-quantum authentication schemes to protect UAV networks. We intend to focus on developing energy-saving hardware and optimizations for real-world deployment in future work.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites have different security problems in addition to nice properties such as low latency and wide coverage. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on these satellites for communication, which makes authentication with Network Control Centres (NCCs) critical. In this paper, a physically unclonable function (PUF)-based lightweight, post-quantum mutual authentication and key establishment protocol tailored for satellite-assisted UAV-NCC links is proposed to address these problems. The scheme uses the benefits of PUF and lightweight cryptographic operations to obtain an efficient scheme for resource-constrained environments while ensuring mutual authentication and quantum-resistant session key establishment.
In this paper, a generic post-quantum authentication protocol is constructed for quantum-resistant satellite communication. This scheme was proposed to address emerging authentication needs in post-quantum satellite communication systems consistent with evolving standards such as Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). In the proposed authentication, it is aimed to obtain additional security features and low communication complexity based on simple operations and post-quantum algorithms. The mutual authentication is achieved by using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC), and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) primitives. The security analysis shows that the proposed authentication provides additional security properties and resistance to replay and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. The main difference between the proposed protocol and PQC-based authentication for satellites in the literature is that it does not require complex operations and provides anonymity, integrity, and legitimacy with the help of lightweight principles. The proposed scheme leverages National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-approved post-quantum cryptographic primitives (e.g., CRYSTALS-Kyber, HQC, SHA3-256), while the overall authentication protocol design is novel and constitutes the main contribution of our work.
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.
To address the issues of high computational overhead, vulnerability to physical capture attacks, and insufficient in offering quantum resistance in traditional blockchain-based cross-domain authentication protocols for collaborative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) missions, we propose APQE-CDA, a PUF-based post-quantum end-to-end cross-domain authentication protocol. The proposed protocol employs a lightweight bucket shifter PUF (BS-PUF) to reduce the computational overhead of UAVs while providing resilience against physical capture attacks. Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) PUF-enhanced Kyber post-quantum cryptography is utilized to ensure secure quantum resistance. In APQE-CDA, we exploit the reversibility of BS-PUF to facilitate secure Challenge Response Pair (CRP) storage on the blockchain while achieving lightweight identity authentication through commutativity. We integrate SRAM PUF randomness into the Kyber key generation mechanism to eliminate key storage on UAVs while ensuring quantum-resistant security in the authentication interactions. Finally, Burrows Abadi Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR), and informal security analysis are adopted to demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme. Experiments conducted on the Raspberry Pi 5 and FPGA platforms show superior computational efficiency, lower power consumption, and enhanced quantum-resistant security compared to existing solutions. Furthermore, extensive validation through the NS3 network simulator and Hyperledger Fabric framework substantiates the protocol’s authentication efficiency and practical viability in real environment conditions.