Lightweight Blockchain-Enhanced Mutual Authentication Protocol for UAVs

Abstract

With the rapid increase of data from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the security and privacy of data presents a severe challenge for UAV-based applications. Moreover, UAVs with constrained resources cannot be equipped with strong but complicated cryptographic primitives for authentication protocol design. Although some attempts have been made to deal with security and privacy issues for UAVs, most of the existing studies have been found numerous security vulnerabilities or own extreme communication/computation overheads. This article offers a lightweight and practical mutual authentication protocol solely comprised of bitwise XOR operations and one-way hash functions. Moreover, blockchain technology is utilized to alleviate the centralized trusted party (TA) issue. Then, security of our proposed authentication protocol is proved by widely adopted formal security proof—Real-or-Random model and informal security proof. The experimental results prove that the proposed protocol can achieve better security requirements (e.g., decentralized TA, replay attack defense, and session key security) with less communication cost (i.e., reduced by around 58.7% at most) and computation cost (i.e., reduced by around 98.9% at most) than related UAV authentication schemes.