Continuous Authentication in a UAVs Swarm

The coordinating interaction allows the UAVs swarm to distribute the workload and increase the efficiency of performing target tasks. However, if it is necessary to change the composition of the UAV swarm and/or the structure of the UAVs subordination, there is a problem of timely correction for the swarm security policies rules and the authentication of swarm objects. We propose, instead of the widespread RSA schemes for authentication of swarm objects, to use a hierarchical scheme of McEliece based on alternate codes, which significantly reduces the time spent on the key exchange process, providing several additional important authentication advantages at the same time. The achieved advantages are the possibility of building a hierarchy of subordination with the equality of secret keys for swarm objects, ensuring the required levels of protection, reducing the effect of key multiplication in swarms with a large number of swarm objects, resistance to quantum attacks.