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IEEE Access

Commitment-Based Authentication for Pseudonymous UAV Remote Identification Using Post-Quantum Primitives and Modeled Ring-Oscillator PUF Reconstruction

Hala Hamadeh, Abdallah Almomani

Published Jan 1, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Remote Identification supports unmanned aerial vehicle accountability, but routine broadcasts are openly observable and copyable. The selected post-quantum key-encapsulation and signature objects exceed the compact Broadcast Remote ID authentication capacity, while per-pseudonym credentials impose linear provisioning and storage costs. This paper presents a commitment-based architecture in which a Trusted-Authority-signed Merkle root authorizes $n$ interval pseudonyms. Routine broadcasts carry a 128-bit pseudonym; an authorized verifier obtains an ordered Merkle path and transcript signature through a unicast exchange protected by post-quantum key encapsulation and authenticated encryption. Authority provisioning and nonvolatile credential state are $O(1)$ per root, whereas tree construction, activation, and volatile state remain $O(n)$ . A modeled ring-oscillator physically unclonable function is evaluated for credential reconstruction using top-950 selection and shortened Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem decoding; Toeplitz extraction is benchmarked separately. Across 1300 pre-silicon runs, 500 nominal virtual devices produced approximately 50% uniformity and inter-instance Hamming distance. Of 100 fixed-mismatch PVT devices, 54 enrolled and all 54 reconstructed successfully across eight nonnominal corners. Processor evaluation showed about 4.5 ms Raspberry Pi 5 authentication latency and $5.64\pm 0.14$ mJ per authentication at $n=16384$ . ESP32 processor measurements demonstrated execution of the selected post-quantum operations; a UAV-mounted ESP32 completed 120/120 recorded outdoor-hover authentication exchanges using provisioned credentials, without physical PUF reconstruction. Controlled mixed-load and network-impairment tests incurred no legitimate-request failures; Tamarin verified authentication and revocation properties. Verifier acceptance establishes credential possession and authorized-set membership; it does not provide physical-source verification or relay resistance.

DOI
10.1109/access.2026.3742543

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Remote Identification supports unmanned aerial vehicle accountability, but routine broadcasts are openly observable and copyable. The selected post-quantum key-encapsulation and signature objects exceed the compact Broadcast Remote ID authentication capacity, while per-pseudonym credentials impose linear provisioning and storage costs. This paper presents a commitment-based architecture in which a Trusted-Authority-signed Merkle root authorizes nnn interval pseudonyms. Routine broadcasts carry a 128-bit pseudonym; an authorized verifier obtains an ordered Merkle path and transcript signature through a unicast exchange protected by post-quantum key encapsulation and authenticated encryption. Authority provisioning and nonvolatile credential state are O(1)O(1)O(1) per root, whereas tree construction, activation, and volatile state remain O(n)O(n)O(n) . A modeled ring-oscillator physically unclonable function is evaluated for credential reconstruction using top-950 selection and shortened Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem decoding; Toeplitz extraction is benchmarked separately. Across 1300 pre-silicon runs, 500 nominal virtual devices produced approximately 50% uniformity and inter-instance Hamming distance. Of 100 fixed-mismatch PVT devices, 54 enrolled and all 54 reconstructed successfully across eight nonnominal corners. Processor evaluation showed about 4.5 ms Raspberry Pi 5 authentication latency and 5.64±0.145.64\pm 0.145.64±0.14 mJ per authentication at n=16384n=16384n=16384 . ESP32 processor measurements demonstrated execution of the selected post-quantum operations; a UAV-mounted ESP32 completed 120/120 recorded outdoor-hover authentication exchanges using provisioned credentials, without physical PUF reconstruction. Controlled mixed-load and network-impairment tests incurred no legitimate-request failures; Tamarin verified authentication and revocation properties. Verifier acceptance establishes credential possession and authorized-set membership; it does not provide physical-source verification or relay resistance.
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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.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms require secure and efficient protocols for communication in dynamic and adversarial environments. This paper presents a post-quantum authenticated key exchange protocol for UAV communications, inspired by recent post-quantum extensions of EDHOC. The protocol is modeled in SAPIC+ and verified in the Tamarin Prover under a Dolev–Yao adversary, establishing executability, mutual authentication, key secrecy, and forward secrecy properties. Communication overhead and handshake latency are estimated using standardized parameter sizes and benchmark data for ARM Cortex-M4 and x86 platforms, showing how the choice of post-quantum primitives affects the feasibility of authenticated key exchange in constrained UAV deployments.
The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has emerged as a promising solution to overcome the limited coverage of conventional roadside unit (RSU)-based infrastructures. However, UAVs operate in open environments and cannot be fully trusted, while the rapid advancement of quantum computing threatens the long-term security of classical public-key cryptographic systems. As a result, many existing UAV-based VANET authentication schemes face fundamental limitations in future deployments. Most existing schemes either lack post-quantum security or incur excessive computational and communication overhead, making them unsuitable for real-time and high-mobility vehicular environments. In addition, the common assumptions of trusted UAVs do not align with realistic threat models. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight post-quantum authentication and key exchange protocol based on the module learning with errors (MLWE) problem and physically unclonable functions (PUFs). The proposed scheme treats UAVs as untrusted relay nodes and excludes them from session key generation. Its security is evaluated using informal analysis, the real-or-random (RoR) model, BAN logic, and AVISPA, while performance evaluation indicates improved efficiency compared to existing schemes.
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.
Resource-constrained unmanned aerial vehicle–ground control station (UAV–GCS) communications face substantial post-quantum authentication costs, expensive cryptographic operations triggered by invalid requests, and key-state desynchronization during rekeying. To address these problems, this paper proposes QUAD, a lightweight hybrid post-quantum authentication and key agreement protocol. QUAD combines request pre-authentication, hybrid key establishment, and mutual key confirmation to reject invalid requests before costly cryptographic operations. It also allows a bounded transition period for receiving records under the old and new keys to mitigate key-state inconsistencies caused by link disruptions. Confidentiality and authentication are analyzed using ProVerif, while cryptographic and communication overhead, denial-of-service scenarios, and key-update behavior are evaluated on a Raspberry Pi platform. Under the specified security model, QUAD satisfies the tested authentication and confidentiality properties, reduces the computational burden of invalid requests, and improves bidirectional communication continuity under selected packet-loss conditions. These findings support its feasibility for post-quantum security in resource-constrained UAV–GCS links.