A lightweight UAV secure communication scheme integrating cross-domain group authentication and reputation awareness

Abstract

With the widespread adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in multi-domain collaborative tasks, traditional centralized authentication mechanisms face significant challenges in handling cross-domain migration, cooperative communication, and resistance to physical attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight multi-domain UAV authentication protocol based on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and a pseudo-identity mechanism. The scheme integrates cross-domain mutual authentication and group-based collaborative verification, while supporting dynamic path construction and reputation-aware authentication strategies. By leveraging challenge index mapping and aggregated authentication messages, the protocol enables path-level secure coordination among UAV. Additionally, a dynamic reputation mechanism is introduced to regulate authentication privileges of abnormal devices. In terms of security, the protocol is formally verified under the Dolev-Yao model using the ProVerif tool to ensure identity authentication and key confidentiality. For performance evaluation, we measure the average execution time of cryptographic operations using standard cryptographic libraries on a PC platform, and estimate the corresponding computational, communication, and storage overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a strong balance between security and efficiency, making it particularly suitable for resource-constrained and highly dynamic UAV collaboration scenarios across multiple domains.