RLBA-UAV: A Robust and Lightweight Blockchain-Based Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for PUF-Enabled UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrated with the internet of things (IoT) guarantee useful advantages such as facilitating ground communications in regions where the availability of connectivity is restricted owing to physical obstacles. However, the data transmitted by sensors and IoT embedded in UAVs are facing new security issues and privacy challenges with the known security attacks over time. To address these security attacks and threats and meet lightweight UAV communication requirements, a secure and lightweight authentication and key agreement (AKA) scheme is essential. Recently, researchers have designed a lightweight blockchain-enabled AKA scheme with privacy-preserving for UAVs to provide useful and reliable services. However, we prove that the existing scheme is fragile to various security attacks and does not ensure mutual authentication. Thus, we propose a robust and lightweight blockchain-based AKA scheme for PUF-enabled UAVs, called RLBA-UAV to enhance the security problems of the existing scheme. We demonstrate the security of RLBA-UAV by using informal/formal security analyses such as the ROR oracle model and AVISPA simulation. Moreover, we demonstrate the performance comparison analysis between RLBA-UAV and related schemes for UAVs. We demonstrate an implementation of a network simulator (NS) 3 compliant with IEEE 802.11p standards to show its validation and feasibility that RLBA-UAV is appropriate for practical UAVs. Thus, RLBA-UAV offers enhanced security and operational efficiency compared to related schemes and can be applied to practical blockchain-based AKA systems for UAVs.