An aggregate authentication framework for unmanned aerial vehicle cluster network

Abstract

The unmanned aerial vehicle technology has achieved rapid development in recent years. In order to ensure the authenticity and reliability of information transmission in unmanned aerial vehicle cluster network (UAVCN), it is necessary to require unmanned aerial vehicles and control center (COC) to perform mutual authentication process. The authentication request issued by COC should be attested and forwarded by aggregators (AGE) to reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles (RAV) in respective cluster, due to the short-distance communication capabilities of RAVs. Moreover, the responses from RAVs are also aggregated and forwarded by their respective administrative AGE to COC. To address the security issues in such authentication scenario, this paper proposes an authentication framework for UAVCN based on the identity-based aggregate signature technology. Security analysis shows that our method offers unforgeability for (attested) authentication request and (aggregate) responses, and performance analysis demonstrates the practicality of our construction.