Energy-Efficient and Secure Communication Toward UAV Networks

Abstract

Wireless networks ensure the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communicate and cooperate with each other, which plays an indispensable role among UAVs. The two crucial challenges in UAV wireless networks are energy saving and security. The current lightweight communication approaches lead to insufficient robustness of the encrypted transmission that is insecure. To address this issue, we propose a secure transmission approach with energy efficiency toward UAVs networks. We design a lightweight symmetric encryption algorithm based on SM4 and the relevant key negotiation and update mechanism to protect the confidentiality of communication contents. Moreover, a modified aggregative BLS signature scheme, together with the Merkle Hash tree (MHT), is introduced to guarantee the integrity and authenticity of data packets in transmission. Furthermore, we propose an online/offline revocable identity-based group signature (OORIBGS) scheme and integrate it into our framework for UAV anonymity, traceability, as well as revocability with small key management cost and high efficiency. We give detailed security analysis and prove that our proposal has the properties of data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity, as well as identity traceability and anonymity. Moreover, we apply our approach in the UAVs networks and evaluate the runtime and anti-attack performance. The experimental results show that the proposed method can be effectively used in UAVs secure communication.