A Blockchain-Based Key Management Scheme in FANETs

Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) enable the deployment of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a clustered manner to execute complex missions, yet their inherent openness poses significant challenges to communication security. However, as a crucial part of ensuring communication security, most existing FANET key management schemes rely on base stations or other infrastructures. This reliance not only complicates communication between UAVs and base stations but also makes the system vulnerable to single point of failure. To address these issues, we introduce a key management scheme based on Blockchain. This scheme in-tegrates the key tree with the secret sharing scheme, which achieves the autonomous generation and updating of group keys, the dynamic joining or exiting of UAVs, and the withdraw of malfunctioning UAVs. Security and performance analyses demonstrate that our scheme effectively resists a variety of security threats, exhibits lower computational overhead and energy consumption compared to similar schemes, making it well-suited for heterogeneous FANET environments.