Location Aware Clustering: Scalable Authentication Protocol for UAV Swarms

Abstract

This letter proposes a scalable authentication protocol to address the security vulnerabilities in UAV-base station communication. UAVs are particularly vulnerable to multiple cyberattacks such as physical capture, cloning attacks, eavesdropping, and man-in-middle attacks. Current solutions propose to address these issues using one-to-one authentication. However, the approach is not scalable, especially in scenarios where a group of UAVs is deployed to provide services to end-users. The scalability is achieved using the K-Means clustering algorithm. The proposed protocol outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of total authentication time.