PUF-based dynamic secret-key strategy with hierarchical blockchain for UAV swarm authentication

Abstract

The evolving UAV swarm flight environment exacerbates the difficulty of secure message delivery within the swarm. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have the potential to provide lightweight physical identities to UAV nodes. Nevertheless, the explicit storage of a private key within each UAV device invariably results in privacy leakage arising from physical hijacking. Therefore, to accomplish unified management and decentralized storage of identity informations for UAVs, as well as to simultaneously realize the dynamic updating of private key, we propose a PUF-based Dynamic Secret-key strategy with Hierarchical Blockchain (PDSHB) for UAV swarm authentication. Specifically, the master blockchain ensures that all UAVs’ registration information is tamper-proof, while the dynamic sub-blockchain synchronizes the UAV information within the swarm. Meanwhile, we have developed a more reliable and efficient PUF-based dynamic secret-key strategy that eliminates the need to store any secret information within UAVs, effectively mitigating the risk of key leakage resulting from physical attacks. Protocol security is demonstrated through formal security proofs, informal security analysis, and AVISPA security checking. Performance experiments based on Raspberry Pi 4B and FPGA-based F450 UAVs also show that the proposed protocol can deal with various security threats of dynamic swarms of UAVs and reduce computational and communication overheads during authentication.