A certificateless identity authentication scheme for UAVs via blockchain sharding

With the growing deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) swarms in national defense, military operations, and emergency response, secure and reliable intra-swarm identity authentication has become critical for ensuring coordinated action and mission reliability. To address the drawbacks of public key infrastructure (PKI) based authentication in UAV swarms, namely, complex certificate management, strong dependence on centralized authorities, and authentication latency. We proposed a certificateless identity authentication scheme for UAV swarms built on blockchain sharding. The scheme leverages sharding to execute authentication in parallel across multiple shards, significantly improving efficiency. Each UAV locally generates its public/private key pair and then adopts a registration-based encryption (RBE) mechanism: A registration algorithm binds the device identity to its key on the blockchain, ensuring public verifiability and immutability of identity mapping. On this basis, an authentication algorithm runs in which the initiator produces an authentication signature using a common reference string (CRS), on-chain public-key registration information, and its local private key, and the verifier rapidly validates the authentication message using the on-chain registration data and the identity of the initiator. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves low-latency, high-throughput identity authentication in large-scale UAV swarm environments, providing a solid technical foundation and broad application prospects for trustworthy UAV swarm identity authentication.