Protecting UAV-Networks: A Secure Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme

Flexible and convenient unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), efficient low-altitude alternatives with complex connectivity, serve exciting applications by expanding the versatility of traditional networks and the integration capacity between air and ground nodes. UAVs network trust secure communication to perform the role objectives, enable and coordinate dispatches. However, more efforts are needed toward security by protecting every entity against malicious attacks in the network. One open challenge in the UAV network lies in keeping bad actors out of the network and enabling security features for highly heterogeneous and resource-hungry devices (sensors, nodes, actuators). To handle that, we design a new practical security scheme to authenticate the legitimacy of peer device connectivity that is lightweight and secure for UAVs network. The proposed protocol provides mutual authentication between UAV and base station devices. We present a formal security verification using the ProVerif tool as well as old-fashioned cryptanalysis to show that the scheme facilitates various security credentials, such as confidentiality, data integrity, identity privacy, etc., and is resilient against well-known security attacks that impersonation, replay, and forwarding security attacks. We also compare our protocol's performance evaluation (of test-bed) results with state-of-the-art authentication protocols for UAVs based on computation costs.