Sec-PUF: Securing UAV Swarms Communication with Lightweight Physical Unclonable Functions
Wassila Lalouani · 2023
UAV swarms are gaining popularity due to the reduced cost of deployment and their ability to perform complex tasks such as environmental monitoring, surveillance, and search and rescue operations. UAV swarms are characterized by a highly dynamic environment and continuous interaction with no guarantee of persistent connectivity to a trusted network infrastructure. Traditional cryptographic techniques can be inefficient in ensuring secure swarm communications due to the UAV resource constraints, the broadcast nature of wireless communication, and the vulnerability of UAVs to physical capture and cloning attacks. This paper aims to address these security issues by developing a novel lightweight secure and authenticated intra swarm communication. The approach incorporates Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and the Chinese Remainder Theorem, which enables the seamless establishment and maintenance of group keys on the fly. Additionally, our mechanism supports implicit keys management using the pseudo-randomness proprieties of the chaotic map. We demonstrate the resiliency of our method against active and passive attacks, using formal analysis framework. We also validate the resiliency of our schema against key modeling attacks using FPGA-based PUF implementation. The results confirm a significant reduction in computational complexity compared to competing schemes.