Challenge-Response to Authenticate Drone Communications: A Game Theoretic Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic challenge-response authentication scheme for drone communications, optimizing security and energy efficiency through strategic positioning and multi-round protocols in various scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes a novel game-theoretic challenge-response authentication method for drones, including strategies for multi-round authentication and energy minimization.

Findings

The scheme effectively detects intruders in urban and rural scenarios.

Optimal strategies reduce energy consumption while maintaining security.

Performance validated through extensive numerical simulations.

Abstract

As drones are increasingly used in various civilian applications, the security of drone communications is a growing concern. In this context, we propose novel strategies for challenge-response physical layer authentication (CR-PLA) of drone messages. The ground receiver (verifier) requests the drone to move to a defined position (challenge), and authenticity is verified by checking whether the corresponding measured channel gain (response) matches the expected statistic. In particular, the challenge is derived from a mixed strategy obtained by solving a zero-sum game against the intruder, which in turn decides its own positions. In addition, we derive the optimal strategy for multi-round authentication, where the CR-PLA procedure is iterated over several rounds. We also consider the energy minimization problem, where legitimate users want to minimize the energy consumption without compromising the security performance of the protocol. The performance of the proposed scheme is tested in terms of both security and energy consumption through numerical simulations, considering different protocol parameters, different scenarios (urban and rural), different drone altitudes, and also in the context of drone swarms.