A Lightweight Authentication Scheme With Dynamic Management for UAVs in Agriculture and Food Industries

As agriculture and food industries evolve towards smarter and more efficient practices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing an increasingly vital role in tasks such as data collection and precision spraying, and the reliable identity authentication has emerged as a critical issue for ensuring operational security and data privacy. Traditional authentication mechanisms, including public-key infrastructure-based and ID-based, have provided mutual trust and security of UAVs. However, when deployed on a large scale of UAVs, they suffer from a single point of failure, a heavy computational overhead, and challenges in managing UAVs at a large scale. In this paper, we propose a lightweight decentralized authentication scheme with dynamic management for UAVs. Specifically, by leveraging the self-sovereign property of DIDs, we enable each UAV to autonomously generate its own identifier, thereby realizing the decentralized authentication. And for the key pairs required in authentication, we design a secure and lightweight secret key generator based on the physical unclonable function (PUF), which prevents key leakage. In terms of identity management, we propose a cryptographic accumulator-based dynamic lightweight management module (DLMM), which is endowed with dynamic scalability and provides efficient dynamic management with low communication and computation overhead. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, and the results show that the proposed scheme has significant advantages in security and computation overhead compared with the existing schemes.