Security-Enhanced Lightweight Authentication Key-Agreement Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Communication

Unmanned aerial vehicles have been widely employed in recent years owing to their remarkable features such as low environmental requirements and high survivability, and a new tendency towards networking, intelligence, and collaboration has emerged. The realization of these novel capabilities requires a secure and efficient wireless communication channel; however, it is vulnerable to eavesdropping, forgery, and manipulation by attackers. Therefore, ensuring the security of the wireless communication between unmanned aerial vehicles and ground stations is an urgent issue. The traditional solution to this problem is to design an authenticated key-agreement protocol between unmanned aerial vehicles and ground stations. However, an analysis of existing representative methods has shown that these methods are computationally expensive and difficult to implement in resource-intensive aerial vehicles. Furthermore, existing key-agreement systems are highly dependent on the security of temporary session information. When the temporary session information is stolen, the attacker can obtain the session key for the current communication and perform information theft attacks. Therefore, a security-enhanced lightweight authenticated key-agreement protocol for unmanned aerial vehicles’ communication is proposed in this study. We present a low-computational-cost agreement method that can achieve secure key agreement in cases of temporary session information leakage. Both theoretical analysis and experimental verification show that our proposed protocol has superior security properties and lower computational costs than representative protocols.