CAKA: Certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Satellite-assisted Unmanned-aerial-vehicle Network

Satellite-assisted Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Network (SUNet) is an emerging latency-sensitive network, that provides communication access to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) spread all over the world. However, existing access schemes are limited either in terms of security or efficiency, and a secure and efficient authentication scheme is urgently needed to secure UAV access to SUNet. To this end, we propose a certificateless authenticated key agreement scheme for satellite-assisted unmanned-aerial-vehicle network (CAKA). It utilizes certificateless cryptography which is based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) without pairing operations, aiming to reduce the computation resources required for authentication and enhance authentication efficiency. In addition to this, we prove the security of CAKA using the Scyther tool, and the results show that our CAKA can resist common types of security attacks while providing anonymity. Performance analysis results show that our CAKA outperforms other authenticated key agreement schemes for UAVs in terms of computation and communication costs.