Toward Blockchain-Assisted Zero-Trust Secure Communication for Decentralized UAV Swarms in GPS-Denied Environments: A Mathematical Security and Scalability Framework

Abstract

Decentralized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms require low-latency peer communication while remaining resilient to spoofing, replay, command injection, key compromise, and malicious membership changes. This study develops a zero-trust communication framework that separates the real-time swarm data plane from a permissioned Byzantine-fault-tolerant trust ledger. The method is grounded in an existing GPS-denied UAV software baseline implementing canonical packet hashing, HMAC-SHA256 authentication, trust epochs, timestamp and sequence freshness checks, onboard security-state transitions, command-policy gating, and firmware trust records. The proposed extension introduces per-node identities, authenticated session establishment, AEAD-protected peer traffic, and event-sparse ledger anchoring for trust-changing evidence. Formal models are derived for message acceptance, trust dynamics, Byzantine tolerance, consensus traffic, storage growth, processing overhead, and energy cost. Under a representative analytical case of 100 swarm messages/s, a 1% anchoring ratio reduces ledger event rate and modeled consensus-control traffic by 100 times compared with per-packet anchoring. Repository benchmark measurements are reported separately from blockchain projections. The analysis supports using blockchain as a decentralized trust anchor rather than as a transport for flight-critical telemetry.