CUBAT-AKA-Collaborative UAV Batch Authentication and Tree-Based Key Agreement

As Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) are highly vulnerable to security threats such as identity spoofing, session replay and man-in-the-middle attacks in open-air channels, it is crucial to design an authentication key agreement (AKA) scheme to ensure the security of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm networking within FANETs. However, existing AKA schemes for FANETs often struggle to balance authentication efficiency and high dynamism within UAV swarms whilst meeting necessary security requirements. To address the issue, this paper proposes CUBAT-AKA (Collaborative UAV Batch Authentication and Tree-based Key Agreement), a lightweight UAV swarm authentication and key agreement scheme based on batch verification and a binary tree structure. The scheme constructs a secure and lightweight three-party authentication mechanism based on aggregated verification and the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). By offloading computational tasks to the authentication center and aggregating authentication responses in batches, it significantly improves the efficiency of UAV access authentication in large-scale FANET scenarios. To address the dynamic nature of UAVs frequently joining and leaving clusters in FANETs, an improved binary tree-based key agreement method has been designed, reducing key update overhead to a logarithmic level and enabling lightweight session key distribution and updates for UAV clusters. Security analysis demonstrates that, under the random oracle model, CUBAT-AKA is resistant to eavesdropping, replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation and collusion attacks, whilst ensuring forward and backward security during member changes. Performance analysis indicates that this scheme offers significant advantages over comparable solutions in terms of both UAV cluster access authentication efficiency and dynamic key agreement overhead.