Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for UAV Communication

Abstract

In order to achieve the requirement for security and lightweight in unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)communication,two authentication and key agreement protocols targeted for UAVs with different computational performance are proposed,including an ECC based protocol,DroneSec,and a symmetric cipher based protocol,DroneSec-lite.The two protocols achieve secure mutual authentication and key configuration between ground stations and UAVs.DroneSec protocol achieves relatively low computational overhead while ensuring forward secrecy through combining ECDH and MAC,which is suitable for relatively high-performance platforms.DroneSec-lite protocol achieves extremely low computational overhead through using only symmetric ciphers,which is suitable for low-performance platforms.The security of the proposed protocols under the enhanced Dolve-Yao model is verified using ProVerif,a formal protocol verification tool,and the performance of the protocols is analyzed in the simulation environment.The results show that it is superior to existing protocols in terms of computation overhead,communication overhead and security.

Keywords

• unmanned aerial vehicle|mutual authentication|key agreement|communication security|security protocol|formal verification