BETA-UAV: Blockchain-based Efficient Authentication for Secure UAV Communication
Sana Hafeez, Mahmoud A. Shawky, Mohammad Al-Quraan, Lina Mohjazi, Muhammad Ali Imran, Yao Sun
TL;DR
The paper tackles secure UAV communications by introducing BETA-UAV, a blockchain-based authentication scheme that achieves mutual authentication with freshness guarantees while minimizing overhead. It combines elliptic curve cryptography, a trusted authority, and Ethereum smart contracts to publish and verify session proofs (TxIDs), enabling tamper-evident and scalable authentication for UAVs and ground control stations. A security analysis demonstrates resilience against impersonation, replay, MITM, and modification, with an implementation on the Ethereum testnet showing lower computation and communication costs compared to prior approaches. The work has practical implications for secure, energy-efficient UAV networks in ITS-like settings, supported by gas-cost and bandwidth assessments on real blockchain platforms.
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), an emerging architecture that embodies flying ad-hoc networks, face critical privacy and security challenges, mainly when engaged in data-sensitive missions. Therefore, message authentication is a crucial security feature in drone communications. This paper presents a Blockchain-based Efficient, and Trusted Authentication scheme for UAV communication, BETA-UAV, which exploits the inherent properties of blockchain technology concerning memorability and is immutable to record communication sessions via transactions using a smart contract. The smart contract in BETA-UAV allows participants to publish and call transactions from the blockchain network. Furthermore, transaction addresses are proof of freshness and trustworthiness for subsequent transmissions. Furthermore, we investigated their ability to resist active attacks, such as impersonation, replaying, and modification. In addition, we evaluate the gas costs associated with the functions of the smart contract by implementing a BETA-UAV on the Ethereum public blockchain. A comparison of the computation and communication overheads shows that the proposed approach can save significant costs over traditional techniques.