IOOSC-U2G: An Identity-Based Online/Offline Signcryption Scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to Ground Station Communication

With recent progress in Internet of Things technology, it is becoming more and more commonplace to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for inconsiderable purposes. On the other hand, traditional all of these UAV networks adopt a susceptible open wireless communication, rendering these systems vulnerable to attacks like eavesdropping, tampering, interrupting, and forging. The most effective way to address these security challenges is through signcryption. However, current signcryption methods are computationally and bandwidth-intensive, making them unsuitable for UAVs with limited resources and ground stations (GS) handling a high volume of messages. To address these challenges, we propose a solution employing an identity-based online/offline signcryption scheme to secure communication from a UAV to GS, known as IOOSC-U2G. This scheme leverages elliptic curve cryptography without the need for time-intensive operations like bilinear pairing. During the online phase, the absence of point multiplication operations, already executed in the offline phase, significantly alleviates computational burdens. This optimization significantly reduces computational overhead throughout the entire signcryption process of messages. Moreover, the IOOSC-U2G scheme ensures the privacy of UAV identities during communication with GS. Additionally, the proposed scheme empowers the GS to verify multiple inputs at once through batch verification method. We demonstrate that within the random oracle model, the IOOSC-U2G scheme guarantees security, specifically confidentiality and unforgeability, relying on the computational hardness assumptions of the elliptic curve inverse Computational Diffie-Hellman problem and the elliptic Discrete Logarithm problem, respectively. Moreover, our scheme outperforms current methods, particularly in computational and communication efficiency.