Blockchain-Assisted Lightweight Cross-Domain Authentication for Multi-UAV Wireless Networks

The evolution of future network and control technologies has enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collaborate across diverse geographical areas and task domains, enhancing task execution efficiency through data and resource sharing. In response to the increasing demand for cross-domain task allocation and operations for UAVs, establishing robust authentication mechanisms within trusted domains has become a critical foundation for ensuring secure cross-domain access. Despite significant progress in UAV identity authentication and cross-domain access, challenges persist, such as cumbersome and inefficient processes, UAV resource limitations, and establishing trust relationships across different domains. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a dual blockchain-assisted trusted authentication scheme for UAVs’ cross-domain access. Our approach utilizes a certificateless signcryption algorithm for lightweight UAV authentication, thereby eliminating the need for certificate management. Then, an efficient credit-based trust model is designed to measure the trustworthiness of data-in-transit and cross-domain entities. Furthermore, blockchain technology is introduced to store the relevant information of UAVs and credibility to assist cross-domain authentication. Theoretical security analysis and extensive simulations have been conducted, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed scheme.