An Auto-Upgradable End-to-End Pre-Authenticated Secure Communication Protocol for UAV-Aided Perception Intelligent System

UAV-enabled intelligent systems are emerging and empowering real-time monitoring and modeling tasks. The security requirements in real-time UAV-enabled intelligent systems are data integrity, authenticity, traceability, tamper-proofing, and privacy. A secure channel established by authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol can cover all the security requirements. However, no UDP-based lightweight pairing-free AKA protocol has been proposed for the UAV system. In this paper, we propose a UDP-compatible Curve25519-infrastructural identity-based end-to-end pre-authenticated key agreement protocol (UDP-IBE2E-pAKA) with system auto-upgrading and direct&lifecycle credential revocation as a lightweight and reliable UDP-based secure communication module for UAV-enabled networks, which perfectly fits the rapid mobility and extremely harsh work environments of UAVs. To protect UAV-enabled systems stable from DDoS attacks, we construct an efficient identity-based signature as a pre-authentication mechanism for the verifier to directly authenticate the sender without any redundant operations. In addition, to prevent the corrupted UAV from monitoring and disrupting attacks, our protocol can revoke the malicious entities directly and immediately with a revocation list in the authentication phase. Moreover, online mode auto-upgradable algorithms are designed to achieve key exposure resistance in our protocol. The full proof of the authenticity and privacy are given in our paper. The comprehensive comparison with other state-of-the-art E2E-AKA protocols indicates that our protocol meets the most robustness and highest efficiency on Raspberry Pi 5.