AFSF: An Anti-Fallback Security Framework Toward U2U-Assited by Ground Stations

As mission requirements continue to expand, the ability to communicate between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has become increasingly vital. However, security has also become a critical issue. UAVs typically operate in open wireless communication networks, which are highly susceptible to various attacks and pose significant threats to the overall security of UAV systems. Therefore, it is imperative to develop robust security protocols. Existing authentication schemes, while effective in ensuring security, mainly focus on lightweight design. However, the session keys between UAVs are generated with the assistance of the ground station. Should the communication link between the drone and the ground station come under attack, the session keys between drones cannot be updated. To address this issue, we propose the Anti-Fallback Security Framework (AFSF). This framework, based on a lightweight design philosophy, ensures UAV anonymity and effectively counters threats such as de-synchronization attacks and replay attacks. AFSF is specifically designed to secure communications between UAVs. Through formal proof, verification using the Scyther tool, and cryptographic analysis, we have conducted a comprehensive security evaluation of AFSF. The results demonstrate that AFSF is highly effective in withstanding a variety of security attacks. Moreover, we compared AFSF with two state-of-the-art existing schemes in terms of computational overhead, communication overhead, and energy consumption. The computational overhead of the proposed solution is 11.4 μs, the communication overhead is 18 μs, and the energy consumption is 7.04 μj. The findings indicate that AFSF outperforms the others in both resource consumption and security.