Group Authentication for Drone Swarms

TL;DR

This paper proposes group authentication methods for drone swarms, addressing security issues related to adding new drones and merging swarms, and compares their performance with 5G NR standards, showing significantly reduced verification times.

Contribution

The study introduces novel group authentication solutions tailored for drone swarms and demonstrates their efficiency compared to existing 5G NR authentication methods.

Findings

Proposed methods achieve lower verification times than 5G NR standard.

Authentication time varies with polynomial threshold, often below 22 ms.

Significant time reduction demonstrated in comparison tests.

Abstract

In parallel with the advances of aerial networks, the use of drones is quickly included in daily activities. According to the characteristics of the operations to be carried out using the drones, the need for simultaneous use of one or more drones has arisen. The use of a drone swarm is preferred rather than the use of a single drone to complete activities such as secure crowd monitoring systems, cargo delivery. Due to the limited airtime of the drones, new members may be included in the swarm, or there may be a unification of two or more drone swarms when needed. Authentication of the new drone that will take its place in the drone swarm and the rapid mutual-verification of two different swarms of drones are some of the security issues in the swarm structures. In this study, group authentication-based solutions have been put forward to solve the identified security issues. The proposed methods and 5G new radio (NR) authentication methods were compared in terms of time and a significant time difference was obtained. According to the 5G NR standard, it takes 22 ms for a user equipment (UE) to be verified by unified data management (UDM), while in the proposed method, this time varies according to the threshold value of the polynomial used and it is substantially lower than 22 ms for most threshold values.