ABA-LEP: Autonomous Bidirectional Authentication and Lightweight Encryption Protocol for drones under ARM architecture

Secure communication protocols for drones are crucial in ensuring safety in potentially threatening network environments. However, existing protocols often suffer from weak autonomy, lack of optimization for ARM architecture, and inefficient utilization of lightweight cryptographic algorithms. To address these issues, this paper designs and analyzes an Autonomous Bidirectional Authentication and Lightweight Encryption Protocol (ABA-LEP) for drones under ARM architecture. The protocol optimizes the fixed-point scalar multiplication in SM2 for ARM architecture to accelerate authentication and key agreement efficiency, and employs simple operations like one-time pad limited XOR for lightweight secure communication encryption. Experiments conducted on the ARM Cortex M-4 based CrazyFlie 2.1 drone demonstrate that, in resource-constrained environments, the ABA-LEP achieves a performance improvement of up to 80.18% in fixed-point scalar multiplication with a 256-bit operand, compared to existing techniques. Additionally, the number of transmitted messages per unit time increases by up to 97.02%. The protocol’s resilience against multiple types of attacks has also been verified using the formal verification tool ProVerif.