A Post-Quantum Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Drone Swarms

With the continuous development of quantum computing technology, the traditional public key cryptosystem is facing severe security challenges, especially in the resource-constrained UAV swarm communication scenario. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes a secure communication scheme for the post-quantum era, which combines the Kyber-based group key agreement mechanism and the lightweight identity authentication system constructed by sparse Merkle tree (SMT). The system is initialized by the edge node, and supports the dynamic joining and leaving of the UAV through the authentication and key management mechanism. To meet the security and performance requirements in different application scenarios, we design and integrate two mainstream post-quantum signature schemes to provide flexible identity authentication options. Experimental results show that the scheme has low resource overhead while ensuring security, which is suitable for the actual communication deployment of post-quantum UAV swarm.