Blockchain-Assisted Distributed and Lightweight Authentication Service for Industrial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown great potential in benefiting industries due to their good features, such as the ease of deployment and low maintenance cost. However, the communication security issue remains a serious challenge before the large-scale application of industrial UAVs. The untrusted communication environment can cause the leakage of valuable industrial data or the losing of important cargos that carried by UAVs. Traditional authentication mechanisms for protecting communications include public-key infrastructure-based, ID-based, and certificateless authentication. These mechanisms rely on a central authority and some of them may introduce high-complexity computation that is not suitable for industrial drones. Therefore, aiming at these challenges, we design a blockchain-assisted distributed and lightweight authentication service for industrial UAVs. The blockchain technology supports the distributed and immutable storage of industrial UAVs’ authentication information, and smart contracts enable convenient operations for drones to acquire or update the corresponding information. Security evaluation demonstrates that our scheme is resistant to various attacks and can guarantee trustworthy communications for industrial drones. Extensive experiments also show that our designed authentication service can not only achieve low computation and communication cost for industrial UAVs but also remain robust even if a small proportion of drones are compromised.