An efficient authentication scheme based on Zero Trust for UAV swarm

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) swarm has been proposed and developed, which effectively solves the shortcomings of relatively small payload and relatively weak information perception processing capability in a single UAV operation. The research and application of UAV swarm technology has become an important direction of the development of UAV technology. UAV swarm not only can effectively improve the load capacity and information processing capacity through close cooperation between single UAV, but also has a high “self-healing” ability and strong robustness. However, due to the limited computing resources and complex external environment of UAVs, UAV swarm are vulnerable to forgery attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks and reply attacks. It is necessary to establish an authentication scheme to ensure the legitimate and reliable identity of UAVs for data exchange and sharing. However, traditional authentication schemes based on username, password or dynamic key have lower security levels, while RSA authentication requires a long session key and cannot meet the lightweight requirements in an UAV swarm. Based on the analysis and summary of existing authentication technologies and the special requirements of UAV swarm for cyber security, this paper puts forward an authentication scheme based on Zero Trust, achieves rapid authentication of UAV swarm in data exchange and sharing, and strengthens its ability to respond to cyber attacks.