Work

A Post-Quantum Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Drone Swarms

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: With the continuous development of quantum computing technology, the traditional public key cryptosystem is facing severe security challenges, especially in the resource-constrained UAV swarm communication scenario. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes a secure communication scheme for the post-quantum era, which combines the Kyber-based group key agreement mechanism and the lightweight identity authentication system constructed by sparse Merkle tree (SMT). The system is initialized by the edge node, and supports the dynamic joining and leaving of the UAV through the authentication and key management mechanism. To meet the security and performance requirements in different application scenarios, we design and integrate two mainstream post-quantum signature schemes to provide flexible identity authentication options. Experimental results show that the scheme has low resource overhead while ensuring security, which is suitable for the actual communication deployment of post-quantum UAV swarm.

Source: Electronics

DOI: 10.3390/electronics14173364

Authors: Linlin He, Meng Zhao, Xu’an Wang, Jue Wang, Zhenyu Wang, Shuanggen Liu

Institutions: East China University of Technology, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chinese People's Armed Police Force Engineering University

Language: English

Topic: Advanced Authentication Protocols Security

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896

Funders: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Education Department of Jiangxi Province