Lightweight Security Authentication Mechanism Towards UAV Networks

Abstract

The drones in the UAV networks can communicate with each other through wireless link. Due to the limited computing resources and complicated external environment of drones, UAV networks are subjected to various attacks such as forgery attack, man-in-the-middle attack and reply attack. Identity authentication is extremely urgent to be established before the drones start to communicate with each other and ensuring a legal drone in the network is the priority of UAV network security. However, traditional authentication mechanism based on username/ password or dynamic key has low secure level. RSA certification needs long session key which can not meet the lightweight requirement in the UAV networks. In this paper, we propose a lightweight identity authentication method based on ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography). We design three main steps: ECC certification initiate, identity authentication and key consistency verification. The first two steps can guarantee the two-way identity authentication and the third step verify the consistency of session key. Compared with traditional authentication method in UAV networks, our approach has shorter key and lower computing workload. Considering the security, our approach solves the problem of key inconsistence caused by calculation faults or packets transmission drops which can guarantee the UAV identity authentication secure. We apply our approach in the UAV networks and evaluate the runtime and antiattack performance. The results show that the proposed method can be effectively used in drones identity authentication.