Secure and Lightweight Mechanism for UAV–GCS and UAV–UAV Authentication Based on PUF

The widespread use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civilian, industrial and emergency applications has increased the need for secure and reliable communication over open wireless channels. Since UAVs exchange sensitive information with Ground Control Stations (GCSs) in real time, so strong authentication and secure key agreement are essential. However, traditional cryptographic techniques impose high computational and energy overheads, which are not suitable for UAV’s resource constrained environments. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol for UAV communication systems. The proposed protocol primarily employs low cost cryptographic operations such as XOR and hash functions , making it efficient for devices with limited processing capabilities. In addition, Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) technology is incorporated to protect UAVs against cloning, impersonation attack and physical capture attack without storing sensitive secrets in non-volatile memory. The proposed protocol security is formally verified using Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic and the Real-or-Random (ROR) model, with additional validation is provided by Scyther simulation. The security analysis confirms that the protocol effectively resists various known attacks. Furthermore, performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed protocol achieves lower computational cost, reduced communication overhead and improved energy efficiency compared to existing state-of-the-art schemes.