An Efficient Certificateless Signcryption Scheme for Secure Communication in UAV Cluster Network

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have been widely used in civilian and military fields. Due to the limited computing power and storage capacity, a single UAV is not suitable for long-distance, large-scale data transmission. Many authentication schemes have been proposed without considering the confidentiality of transmitted data. In order to address the security and privacy issues in UAV-assisted data collection scenario, a Certificateless Aggregate Signcryption (CL-ASC) scheme is proposed in this paper, where data privacy and authenticity of data source can be guaranteed. The Aggregate Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (AGV) in each UAV cluster is able to batch verify the signcryption ciphertexts from UAVs in its administrative domain, before adding its signcryption ciphertext to the aggregate one and forwarding to the Control Station (CS) for further batch verification and decryption. The security analysis shows that the CL-ASC construction can effectively resist attacks from external adversaries and malicious CS, and offers existential unforgeability on the (aggregate) signcryption ciphertext under the ECDLP assumption. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed CL-ASC construction enjoys high computational efficiency and is practical in resource-constrained UAV cluster network scenarios.