S-MAPS: Scalable Mutual Authentication Protocol for Dynamic UAV Swarms

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) domain has seen rapid developments in recent years. UAVs have been deployed for many applications and missions like data transmission, cellular service provisioning, and computational offloading tasks etc. Yet, UAV deployment is still limited, partially owing to the security challenges it poses. UAVs are particularly vulnerable to physical capture, cloning attacks, eavesdropping, and man in the middle attacks. To address some of these security problems, this paper develops an authentication protocol for use in UAV swarms. To ensure physical security and rapid authentication, the proposed protocol uses Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). The protocol achieves high scalability compared to the state of the art by authenticating multiple devices at once. The proposed protocol supports dynamic topologies and multi-hop communication by using spanning tree-based traversal. It is also resistant to mobility, device tampering attack, etc., and its improvements are achieved at significantly lower communication and communication cost as compared to state-of-the-art protocols.