Lightweight online offline authenticated encryption for secure UAV systems

Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly being used for surveillance, environmental monitoring, disaster response, and intelligent transportation systems. However, protecting their connection remains a significant issue due to open wireless channels, severe energy limits, and the requirement for low-latency computing. This paper proposes a lightweight certificateless aggregate signcryption scheme exclusively designed for UAV networks. The proposed technique provides ciphertext aggregation, online/offline computation, and decreased communication cost, making it ideal for UAV situations with limited bandwidth and resources. To achieve strong security guarantees with a lower computation and communication cost, the approach uses hyper-elliptic curve cryptography, which offers much smaller key sizes than elliptic curve or pairing-based systems while maintaining equivalent security strength. The approach combines signcryption, key management, and ciphertext aggregation into a single framework that enables multi-UAV message compression before transmission to the ground station. The security of the proposed scheme is analyzed informally under the hardness of the Hyperelliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (HECDLP), providing heuristic arguments for confidentiality, unforgeability, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation against both Type-I and Type-II adversaries. A thorough performance analysis, including computational cost, communicational overhead, and running time, shows that the proposed scheme outperforms previous systems. The experimental results indicate significant reductions in computational and communication overhead, making the proposed technique ideal for UAV-enabled edge intelligent IoT environments and confirming its effectiveness as a secure and efficient cryptographic foundation for next-generation UAV swarm communication.