Achieving Secure and Reliable UAV Authentication: A Shamir's Secret Sharing Based Approach

In recent years, the rapid development of wireless communication-based technologies has been particularly prominent in the context of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications. However, despite significant progress, the realization of the full potential of UAV-based applications is hindered by inherent security vulnerabilities, including the susceptibility of communication between drones and base stations to intrusion. This research addresses critical research gaps by proposing a novel authentication method that leverages Shamir's secret sharing. Unlike existing authentication protocols, which often rely on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) that assume resistance to noise and theoretical ideals, our approach acknowledges the potential errors in PUF responses. This accommodation allows for the successful authentication of legitimate UAVs, even in the presence of external environmental factors introducing noise in PUFs. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive simulations were conducted using NodeMCU and Raspberry Pi devices. We show that our approach outclasses other existing methods across multiple dimensions with communication cost of mere $450 \mu s$ on NodeMCU. Additionally, it incurs lower communication costs (1600 bits) and storage costs (352 bits), showcasing superior efficiency. Moreover, it maintains robust security and scalability while consuming reasonable energy levels, making it a comprehensive solution for UAV-based applications.