Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme Enabled by Stateless Blockchain for UAV Networks

The UAV network composed of resource-constrained lightweight UAV swarms can efficiently accomplish mission with time critical requirements in dynamic and complex environments. However, the trusted authentication of network nodes poses a huge challenge due to its own resource constraints, the lack of trusted centralized support, frequent joining or departure of UAVs to or from the network, and the presence of cyber-attacks. In this paper, we propose a stateless blockchain based on triple aggregatable subvector commitment and present a dynamic proof of trust authorization consensus mechanism with a periodic random selection of authorized nodes to guarantee the trustworthiness of mutual authentication of UAV nodes. Our proposed triple vector authentication solution solves several of the challenges mentioned above very well. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our blockchain-based authentication scheme enjoins significant advantages over the four schemes currently available for UAV network authentication in terms of single authentication latency, speed of energy consumption, average computational cost, and end-to-end latency.