Yuji Sang, Chenglong Xu, Long Lv, Lijun Liu · 5 authors
Abstract Aiming at the security issues of open channel vulnerability, limited node resources, and single-point failure caused by centralized authentication in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm networks, this paper proposes an authentication and key agreement scheme integrating Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), Chebyshev chaotic map and blockchain. The scheme constructs an integrated architecture of physical security, lightweight encryption and distributed trust, which supports mutual authentication in dual scenarios of UAV-Ground Control Station (GCS) and UAV-UAV. Decentralized trusted authentication is realized via blockchain and smart contracts, ensuring that authentication information is tamper-proof and traceable. Formal security verification based on the ROR model and informal analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme satisfies multiple security requirements including anonymity and forward secrecy, and can resist common attacks such as replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack and physical capture attack. Performance evaluation results indicate that the scheme completes authentication with only two rounds of interaction. Its computational and communication overheads are significantly lower than those of existing schemes, making it suitable for resource-constrained UAV swarms.
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.