CSECMAS: An Efficient and Secure Certificate Signing Based Elliptic Curve Multiple Authentication Scheme for Drone Communication Networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of communication technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in the military, rescue, agricultural and other fields. The security and privacy issues are one of the biggest challenges for UAV communications. In this paper, we propose a certificate signing based on an Elliptic Curve multiple authentication scheme (CSECMAS). The scheme employs multiple authentication tools to ensure the legitimacy of the identity and the integrity of the information. We treat multiple UAVs as a cluster, and after establishing a secure session between the ground control station (GCS) and the UAV, we use the fitness function to select one node from them as the key node. Mutual authentication between the UAVs through the key node establishes secure conversations while increasing the security and resistance to destruction of the entire communication network. The proposed protocol is formally analyzed and verified by using the model-checking tool SPIN. The informal analysis shows that the protocol can resist various attacks, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, and DoS attacks. The performance analysis shows that the proposed protocol is superior compared to other related protocols.