Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Physical Unclonable Function and Chaotic System

With the continuous miniaturization of electronic devices and the recent advancement in wireless communications, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will find many new uses in people’s production and life, bringing great convenience to the public. Meanwhile, the cybersecurity of UAVs is gaining significant attention due to both financial and strategic information and value involved in aerial applications, and UAV and sensitive data collected by embedded sensors are subject to new security challenges and privacy issues. Traditional cryptographic techniques can be deployed to provide fundamental security services, however, they have been shown to be inefficient because of intrinsic resource constraints of UAVs and the open nature of wireless communication. For the sake of providing secure authentication between communication parties and further ensuring data security and privacy, this paper proposes a lightweight mutual authentication protocol, also referred to as PCAP, for secure communications between UAVs and ground station. The basic idea of the PCAP is that UAV and ground station use the challenge-response pair of physical unclonable function as the initial condition of chaotic system to randomly shuffle the message which piggybacks a seed to generate a secret session key. We conduct simulation experiments using OMNeT++to validate the effectiveness of the PCAP. The simulation results show that the PCAP can achieve better performance in terms of computation cost, communication overhead, and energy consumption of communication compared to prior cryptographic technique, indicating a viable approach for securing communications between UAVs and ground station.