A UAV Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol Based on PUF and Chebyshev Chaotic Map

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in open environments, where physical capture threats and stringent resource constraints pose significant challenges to secure communications. This paper proposes a bidirectional authentication and key agreement protocol based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and an extended Chebyshev chaotic mapping. The protocol uses a trusted ground station to support mutual authentication through PUF-based challenge–response processing. Each UAV retains its identity and pseudonym as persistent information, but stores no persistent cryptographic secret key. During the key agreement phase, the commutative semigroup property of the Chebyshev chaotic map is used to replace elliptic-curve point multiplication in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). OMNeT++ simulation results show that the proposed protocol incurs a computational overhead of 0.822 ms per UAV pair, a storage overhead of 320 bits per UAV, and a communication overhead of 2400 bits per authentication session, demonstrating its low overhead and suitability for resource-constrained UAV networks.