A Certificateless Aggregate Signature and Outsourced Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme for UAV Data Sharing

With the rapid development of consumer unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, UAVs have been widely deployed in public, civilian, and military areas, owing to the flexibility, mobility, and low cost. However, the sensitive data collected by UAVs faces severe challenges in terms of security protection, trusted storage, flexible sharing, and fine-grained access control. Although existing solutions combine data encryption, blockchain, and distributed storage systems (e.g., IPFS) to improve security and reliability, they still suffer from poor adaptability to real UAV application scenarios and excessive computation overhead on resource-constrained platforms. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel secure UAV data sharing scheme, namely DVCLAS-OABE-E, which integrates designated verifier certificateless aggregate signature (DVCLAS) and outsourced attribute-based encryption (OABE) with data emergency access mechanism. It achieves fine-grained access control over UAV data with dynamically generated access policies; ensures signature anonymity and prevents forgery through the designed verifier aggregate signature mechanism; reduces the computational burden on UAV terminals by deploying outsourced encryption modules. Notably, we present a special data emergency access mechanism to securely retrieve real-time data in emergency situations, which guarantees both timeliness and data security. The experimental results demonstrate significant improvement on encryption/decryption efficiency and computational overhead, revealing it particularly suitable for resource-constrained security-critical UAV data sharing environments.