Identity Management and Authentication of a UAV Swarm Based on a Blockchain

Abstract

In recent years, with the continuous development of UAV technology, the application of the UAV swarm in the military has been a global focus of research. Although it can bring a series of benefits in autonomous cooperation, the traditional UAV management technology is prone to hacker attacks due to many security issues, such as a single point of failure brought by centralized management and the lack of reliable identity authentication. This paper studies the advantages and the recent advances of the blockchain in UAV swarm, proposes a blockchain-based UAV swarm identity management model (B-UIM-M), and establishes a distributed identity authentication scheme based on the distributed identity identifier (DID) under this model. Moreover, to ensure the safe transmission of UAV communication data, a secure communication architecture based on blockchain and a set of secure transmission protocols were designed, combined with cryptography. In the current military field, there is no similar application case of the UAV swarm identity management model and distributed identity authentication. The feasibility and security of the proposed scheme are proved through experiments and security analyses.