Robust and lightweighted mutual authentication scheme for drone swarm networks
Kiran Illyass, Zubair Ahmed Baig, Naeem Syed · Journal of Network and Computer Applications · 2025
Drones are being increasingly adopted across both military and commercial domains to serve remote rendering, monitoring, surveillance and service delivery operations. Drone swarms comprise multiple drones operating cohesively as a unified system to provide collective services. Each drone in a swarm must establish mutual trust with other drones to ensure authenticity in data exchange and also to prevent the compromise of a mission. Inter-drone communication links are vulnerable to cyber threats, including unauthorized access and spoofing. While most existing studies focus on authentication mechanisms for drone-to-stationary base stations, very little research work has explored inter-drone authentication protocols specifically designed for decentralized topologies. We propose a lightweight authentication scheme for inter-drone communication that leverages a dynamic challenge-response mechanism, hash-based message authentication code and authenticated encryption to facilitate mutual authentication. We validate the efficacy of the proposed protocol through extensive informal analysis based on the Dolev–Yao and the Canetti-Krawczyk threat models and through Scyther and random oracle-based formal analysis. We also compare the protocol’s performance with state-of-the-art authentication schemes to demonstrate its efficacy and efficiency. The results obtained demonstrate the supremacy of the protocol in cost-effective threat prevention for swarms of drones.