Efficient Group Key Generation Based on Satellite Cluster State Information for Drone Swarm

In the context of drone swarms, achieving efficient group secure communication is a challenging problem, due to the inherent limitations imposed by the drones’ limited energy and constrained resources. Physical layer group key generation (PLGK) is a promising technology to enable efficient group security communication. However, most existing PLGK schemes struggle to adapt to the dynamic nature of drone swarms. To address this gap, this paper proposes a novel satellite cluster state information (SCSI)-based PLGK, which leverages signal status information from all visible navigation satellites to establish the group key. The presented method utilizes the regional similarity of SCSI as a random information source to generate group keys between different drones, and employs a novel updating framework based on a fuzzy generator and a hash chain to enhance key update and alignment robustness. The proposed scheme not only significantly reduces the overhead of group key generation also mitigates the issues of key loss and reconstruction. The security of the proposed scheme is validated through formal protocol security proof and security analysis against possible attacks. Finally, experiments with real-world drones demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the SCSI-based PLGK.