Fixing Drone Auth: A Practical and Secure, Blockchain-Enabled UAV Authentication Scheme

Abstract

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical and privacy-sensitive applications, including infrastructure inspection, precision agriculture, emergency response, and on-demand connectivity. However, UAVs' mobility and intermittent connectivity expose them to diverse security threats, making robust yet efficient authentication and key agreement (AKA) essential. We present PSB-UAKA, a Practical and Secure Blockchain-enabled UAV Authentication and Key Agreement scheme. PSB-UAKA combines physical unclonable functions (PUFs) with fuzzy extractors to avoid maintaining a challenge–response pair (CRP) database while improving resilience to device-capture attacks. It further leverages Merkle-tree proofs for lightweight authorization verification and adopts session-bound pseudonym rotation to support unlinkability and tolerate desynchronization. We formalize a UAV-specific threat model and prove session authenticity and key indistinguishability in the Real-or-Random (RoR) framework. Our comparative analysis shows that PSB-UAKA provides roughly 25% broader security coverage than representative baselines, with notable gains in anonymity and desynchronization resilience. Experimental results indicate low computational overhead (below 0.066 ms on user devices and 1.436 ms on UAVs) and up to 54% reduction in UAV-side storage. Finally, extensive NS-3 simulations under realistic mobility and wireless conditions demonstrate lower authentication latency and stable throughput relative to state-of-the-art schemes, suggesting that PSB-UAKA is practical for real-world UAV deployments.