A LIGHTWEIGHT AUTHENTICATION PROTOCOL LAPHECC FOR DRONE USING HECC SCHEME

With the growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones, ensuring secure communication in open-access environments has become essential. While authentication systems based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are widely adopted due to their efficiency and reduced key sizes, further improvements are needed to enhance communication security and computational performance. To address this, we introduce LAPHECC, a lightweight authentication protocol that replaces ECC with Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC). HECC is particularly well-suited for resource-limited devices, as it provides stronger security per bit and requires even smaller key sizes than ECC. The protocol incorporates a preregistration stage and employs a Schnorr-based zero-knowledge session key update mechanism to guarantee both forward and backward secrecy. Security evaluations show that LAPHECC delivers minimal computational and communication overhead while ensuring core security properties such as confidentiality, mutual authentication, and resistance to replay and impersonation attacks.