A Provably Secure Yet Efficient Authenticated Key Agreement for Flying Ad-hoc Networks

The evolution of Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETS) marks a paradigm shift from reliance on a single, large unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to collaborative systems comprising multiple small UAVs that dynamically form temporary, self-organizing networks. Owing to their flexibility and scalability, FANETS have garnered significant attention in both academia and industry, enabling diverse applications ranging from intelligent transportation systems and e-health services to smart tourism and emergency response coordination. To sustain reliable communication in their inherently multi-hop architecture, FANETS must efficiently manage constrained resources while preserving stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. However, the open nature of wireless communication coupled with the high mobility and dynamic topology of UAVs renders FANETS particularly susceptible to security breaches. Malicious nodes can exploit these characteristics to infiltrate the network, jeopardizing both data integrity and user privacy. Potential threats include bandwidth exhaustion through excessive reservation requests, eavesdropping on control-plane messages, and injection of forged information to disrupt routing or consensus mechanisms. To mitigate such risks, robust access control and secure key agreement protocols are essential. Specifically, a two-phase mechanism comprising mutual node authentication followed by authenticated key establishment is necessary to counteract the aforementioned attack vectors. In this paper, we propose a novel, lightweight, and fully decentralized authentication and key agreement scheme tailored for FANET environments. Our approach leverages certificate-based credentials grounded in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and incorporates a collision-resistant one-way cryptographic hash function to ensure efficiency and security. Through rigorous formal and informal security analyses including verification via Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic we demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively resists a wide spectrum of known attacks, including replay, impersonation, man-in-the-middle, and denial-of-service threats, thereby ensuring secure and trustworthy communication within FANETS.

کلیدواژه ها:

Flying Ad-hoc Networks. (FANETS) ، Drones ، Security ، BAN Logic ، unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) ، Key agreement