DVA-ACLF: Designated Verifier Asymmetric Anonymous Credential Scheme for Low-Altitude Flight

Abstract

Low-altitude aerial networks play an increasingly critical role in urban logistics, emergency response, and intelligent airspace management. These networks must ensure reliable identity authentication while addressing privacy, efficiency, and security challenges. Traditional authentication mechanisms—such as PKI-based certificates and remote identification—either overexpose identity data or lack support for flexible attribute disclosure. Moreover, existing anonymous credential (AC) schemes, though offering privacy, often incur high computational and communication costs and exist vulnerable to replay attacks. To address these limitations, we proposeDVA-ACLF(Designated Verifier Asymmetric Anonymous Credential Scheme for Low-Altitude Flight), a lightweight credential system tailored for UAVs. DVA-ACLF leverages an efficient MAC-based construction combined with non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs to enable selective attribute disclosure without relying on pairings. It supports designated verification to prevent credential misuse and replay. Experimental results show that DVA-ACLF reduces credential size by 49% (2720 bits vs. 5369 bits in Idemix) and mitigates the linear growth of credential size with respect to attribute count observed in CL and BBS+ schemes. It requires only four single-base and$2(k-l)$double-base exponentiations on UAVs, where$k$is the number of selected attributes and$l$is the number of disclosed attributes—both typically small. These features make DVA-ACLF a strong candidate for secure, efficient, and privacy-preserving authentication in low-altitude flight applications.