BAZAM: A Blockchain-Assisted Zero-Trust Authentication in Multi-UAV Wireless Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are vulnerable to interception and attacks when operated remotely without a unified and efficient identity authentication. Meanwhile, the openness of wireless communication environments potentially leads to data leakage and system paralysis. However, conventional authentication schemes in the UAV network are centered on the fixed trust boundary, ignoring potential internal threats and failing to flexibly respond to the dynamic requirements of UAV access and identity authentication. Additionally, UAVs are not subjected to periodic repetitive identity authentication, leading to difficulties in controlling access anomalies. Therefore, in this work, we consider a zero-trust framework for UAV network authentication, aiming to achieve UAV identity authentication through the principle of "never trust and always verify". We introduce a blockchain-assisted zero-trust authentication scheme, namely BAZAM, designed for multi-UAV wireless networks. In this scheme, UAVs follow a key generation approach using physical unclonable functions (PUFs), and cryptographic technique helps verify registration and access requests of UAVs. The blockchain is applied to store UAVs authentication-related information in immutable storage. Through thorough security analysis and extensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed BAZAM.