ChainDrone: Lightweight Group Authentication and Audited Data Transfer for Drone Swarms With Blockchain Integration

Abstract

Secure, low-latency coordination is essential for collaborative UAV missions such as disaster response, precision agriculture, and environmental monitoring. However, existing Internet of Drones (IoD) authentication frameworks remain misaligned with dynamic swarm requirements: PKI-based schemes incur heavy certificate management overhead, blockchain-assisted protocols depend on continuous ledger interaction, and most lightweight solutions support only pairwise authentication without scalable group formation or auditable revocation. Even recent PUF-based approaches provide device-rooted identity but lack efficient group rekeying and verifiable control accountability. This paper proposes Chain Drone, a lightweight, auditable, and revocation-aware framework for secure authentication and data transfer in UAV swarms. ChainDrone integrates: 1) functional encryption with PUF-rooted identities to enable privacy-preserving, device-bound authentication; 2) scalable group key management using pairwise channels or an LKH-style hierarchy that supports forward/backward secrecy and $O(\log n)$ revocation; and 3) a minimal, permissioned blockchain layer that records only hash commitments of control events, providing verifiable auditability without exposing sensitive data. Analytical evaluation and experimental results show that each drone incurs only one PUF-based key regeneration, a single elliptic-curve scalar multiplication, and a few hash operations during authentication, while blockchain overhead remains constant per epoch. Compared with representative lightweight and blockchain-assisted baselines, ChainDrone achieves predictable authentication and revocation costs with significantly lower on-chain gas and latency, providing a practical and scalable foundation for secure UAV swarm coordination.