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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.