An Anonymous Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for UAVs in Flying Ad-Hoc Networks
Yanan Liu1,*, Suhao Wang1,*, Lei Cao1, Pengfei Wang1, Zheng Zhang2, Shuo Qiu1, Ruchan Dong1
1 School of Network Security, Jinling Institute of Technology, Nanjing, 211169, China
2 School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China
* Corresponding Author: Yanan Liu. Email: 
; Suhao Wang. Email: 
Computers, Materials & Continua https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2025.072710
Received 02 September 2025; Accepted 24 October 2025; Published online 21 November 2025
Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Flying
Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) are widely used in both civilian and military fields, but they face severe security, trust, and privacy vulnerabilities due to their high mobility, dynamic topology, and open wireless channels. Existing security protocols for Mobile
Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) cannot be directly applied to FANETs, as FANETs require lightweight, high real-time performance, and strong anonymity. The current FANETs security protocol cannot simultaneously meet the requirements of strong anonymity, high security, and low overhead in high dynamic and resource-constrained scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an Anonymous Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol (AAKE-OWA) for UAVs in FANETs based on One-Way Accumulators (OWA). During the UAV registration phase, the Key Management Center (KMC) generates an identity ticket for each UAV using OWA and transmits it securely to the UAV’s on-board tamper-proof module. In the key exchange phase, UAVs generate temporary authentication tickets with random numbers and compute the same session key leveraging the quasi-commutativity of OWA. For mutual anonymous authentication, UAVs encrypt random numbers with the session key and verify identities by comparing computed values with authentication values. Formal analysis using the Scyther tool confirms that the protocol resists identity spoofing, man-in-the-middle, and replay attacks. Through Burrows Abadi Needham (BAN) logic proof, it achieves mutual anonymity, prevents simulation and physical capture attacks, and ensures secure connectivity of 1. Experimental comparisons with existing protocols prove that the AAKE-OWA protocol has lower computational overhead, communication overhead, and storage overhead, making it more suitable for resource-constrained FANET scenarios. Performance comparison experiments show that, compared with other schemes, this scheme only requires 8 one-way accumulator operations and 4 symmetric encryption/decryption operations, with a total computational overhead as low as 2.3504 ms, a communication overhead of merely 1216 bits, and a storage overhead of 768 bits. We have achieved a reduction in computational costs from 6.3% to 90.3%, communication costs from 5.0% to 69.1%, and overall storage costs from 33% to 68% compared to existing solutions. It can meet the performance requirements of lightweight, real-time, and anonymity for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) networks.
Keywords
Authentication; key exchange; one-way accumulator; flying
ad-hoc networks; security
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