A Robust PUF-Based Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol Using FPGA to Secure UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles have become indispensable in numerous sectors, serving as invaluable tools for data acquisition, relaying and delivery. The data often encompass crucial information, including that of critical missions. However, the widespread use of these vehicles has raised concerns about potential data breaches, making data security a paramount concern. If not properly secured, these data could be exploited by malicious adversaries, jeopardizing user privacy and security. UAVs face vulnerabilities in both device and data security. These vulnerabilities open the door to threats such as impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, signal jamming attacks and many more, all of which can significantly disrupt mission performance. This article concentrates on enhancing UAV security for critical missions like disaster response using Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). A PUF utilizes variations in silicon properties within a device to generate digital patterns that is unique to each device. The patterns are used as cryptographic keys and can be reliably generated whenever needed, eliminating the necessity of storage. Consequently, when the device is powered off, no secret key is retained in any form of memory and thus, is made invisible to potential attackers. In this work, we propose a robust PUF-based mutual authentication and key agreement protocol to enhance the security of UAV communications. No identical C-R pairs is employed across sessions, to safeguard data integrity. We analyze the performance of the proposed protocol on Scyther tool and compare our proposed work with benchmark security approaches in terms of their computational costs.