LDST-UAVS: A Lightweight Data Secure Transmission Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarms in Emergency Rescue Scenarios

Currently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) groups can quickly build a multi-hop transmission network, which have been widely utilized in emergency communication scenarios to perform search and rescue, environmental monitoring, personnel positioning, rapid networking, etc. In such emergency rescue situations, strict demands on real-time communication, security, and minimal resource consumption become paramount. Higher requirements for security, bandwidth, and real-time performance necessitate a secure and lightweight data transmission protocol. Additionally, due to the lack of personnel supervision in these scenarios, the probability of malicious nodes increases. Therefore, it is essential to quickly and proximally block malicious nodes’ data to prevent it from affecting subsequent network propagation, and to accurately identify the malicious nodes. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a traceable, lightweight, and secure data transmission protocol for UAV multi-hop networks in emergency rescue scenarios. The proposed protocol can verify the integrity of data transmitted by a large number of nodes in real time, detect erroneous transmissions, and trace malicious users. Experimental results show that our protocol consistently outperforms the comparison schemes in terms of computational overhead. Moreover, in scenarios involving smaller groups (m=5) and fewer hops (n=4), it exhibits significantly lower communication bandwidth overhead than the reference methods. Security analysis using BAN logic and the formal verification tool Scyther indicates that the proposed scheme meets security requirements. Additionally, comparative analysis results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is highly effective and outperforms other related schemes under the unique constraints of emergency rescue scenarios, where rapid, secure decision-making and data transmission are critical.