Aug 2026· Future Internet· Vol 18, pp. 412· 0 citations· 26 references
TL;DR
Formal verification results demonstrate that AERO-GUARD satisfies the targeted security properties, including mutual authentication, secrecy preservation, and replay resistance, confirming the protocol’s resilience against common authentication attacks.
Abstract
This paper presents AERO-GUARD, a formally verified drone authentication and road surveillance system that integrates Kyber post-quantum key encapsulation, physical unclonable functions (PUFs), decentralized IPFS-based identity storage, and blockchain-anchored audit logging. AERO-GUARD operates across three phases, key provisioning, enrollment, and authentication, enforcing mutual authentication, replay resistance, and privacy-preserving comparison through an off-chain evaluator (OCE) that performs homomorphic subtraction on encrypted PUF responses without accessing plaintext secrets. The protocol is modeled and verified using ProVerif 2.05 under the Dolev–Yao adversary model. To evaluate the system beyond theoretical verification, a simulation environment was developed to replicate realistic road conditions, incorporating a simulated road network and a virtual drone traversing monitored routes. An AI model is deployed to perform real-time detection of suspicious and anomalous activities along the road. All detection events are surfaced through a centralized monitoring dashboard that provides authorized personnel with live alerts, a drone camera livestream with detection annotations, and contextual drone telemetry, enabling timely and informed incident response. Formal verification results demonstrate that AERO-GUARD satisfies the targeted security properties, including mutual authentication, secrecy preservation, and replay resistance, confirming the protocol’s resilience against common authentication attacks.
: Secure UAV communication requires robust, quantum-resistant protocols that are resilient to physical capture and operate under severe resource constraints. This work identifies critical vulnerabilities—including desynchronization, capture attacks, and lack of forward secrecy—in the LIGKYX protocol(Xia et al., 2024). To address these flaws, we propose a novel protocol that replaces LIGKYX’s ECC with Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for device authentication and integrates the post-quantum Kyber mechanism for key establishment. Enhanced with authenticated encryption and nonce-based key derivation, our protocol is formally verified (using BAN logic) to resist replay, impersonation, desynchronization, and capture attacks. Performance analysis confirms its lower computational and communication overhead, making it suitable for constrained UAV networks.
Mohammed Zitouni, Hicham Hameurlaine, Mustapha Bensalah· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Aiming at open wireless vulnerabilities, limited airborne computing resources and single-point failure risks of centralized authentication architectures in UAV swarms, this paper proposes an AKA scheme integrating PUF and Chebyshev chaotic map, which constructs a three-layer security framework covering hardware security, lightweight encryption and semi-decentralized trust. As the unique offline trust anchor, the GCS completes system initialization, blockchain deployment and UAV offline registration via secure out-of-band channels to issue UAV long-term static private keys. After the genesis block is locked, blockchains and smart contracts support GCS-independent distributed UAV-UAV authentication with tamper-evident and traceable authentication records. Formal ROR security verification and informal risk analysis jointly prove that the protocol achieves computationally bounded conditional anonymity (which alleviates identity linkability risks brought by on-chain credentials, public keys and transaction metadata) and forward secrecy under the premise that the GCS is not compromised. When the GCS suffers complete data leakage, the scheme can guarantee intra-swarm anti-impersonation mutual authentication only if adversaries cannot obtain real-time access to current on-chain public PID and CredUAV\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$Cred_{UAV}$$\end{document} alongside all UAV static private keys. The proposed protocol can defend against replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks and physical node capture attacks under Tier-1 limited GCS leakage (adversaries steal GCS secrets but have no authority to query current blockchain public data). The whole authentication flow only requires two rounds of message interaction, and its computational, communication and energy overheads are significantly lower than state-of-the-art AKA protocols designed for resource-constrained UAV swarm nodes.
Yu-Jie Sang, Cheng-Long Xu, Long-hui Lv et al.· Journal of King Saud Univers...· 0 citations
The convergence of autonomous aerial systems and networking technologies has given rise to the Internet of Drones (IoD) as a compelling paradigm, gaining significant attention from academia and industry stakeholders. Drones often operate in swarm formations to collaboratively achieve autonomous coordination and aerial intelligence, thereby forming a Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET). However, the persistent vulnerability remains in the insecure communication link, exposing the network to eavesdropping and unauthorized access. Addressing such shortcomings necessitates a robust Authentication and Key Exchange (AKE) protocol. Therefore, we have designed a quantum secure AKE protocol integrating NIST-proven quantum secure primitives, including ML-DSA, symmetric AES, and hash functions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first AKE protocol that leverages a quantum secure signature scheme for securing IoD-enabled FANET applications. The designed protocol incorporates hardware-specific fingerprinting integrated with a noise tolerance mechanism to eliminate the risk of unauthorized device tampering. The use of re-synchronization and robust security measures for credential management further enhances its resilience against desynchronization and stolen attacks. The findings of performance evaluation exhibit the superiority of the designed protocol over the prevalent AKE protocols, with a remarkable reduction of 67.62% in computation cost while achieving a 50% improvement in overall security. Finally, implementing a complete authentication cycle using PIX32 and Pixhawk 6C drones sets a new benchmark as a practical validation of the designed AKE protocol within a real-world IoD testbed.
Salman Shamshad, Sana Belguith, Alma Oracevic· IEEE transactions on intelli...· 1 citation
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become a vital component of intelligent transport systems, with their security concerns increasingly drawing attention. To safeguard user privacy and ensure data authenticity and integrity, researchers have devised numerous certificateless conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CLCPPA) schemes. However, existing schemes generally suffer from insufficient security or high computational and communication overhead. Moreover, most implicitly assume the existence of a secure channel between vehicles and trusted entities during pseudonym generation and transmission, making it difficult to meet the real-time demands and practical deployment requirements of VANETs. To address these issues, this paper constructs a certificateless aggregated conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CL-ACPPA) scheme under elliptic curve cryptography that does not require bilinear operations. Formal security analysis demonstrates that, under the Random Oracle Model and the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem assumption, the proposed scheme resists adaptive chosen-message attacks from adversaries with varying capabilities. Performance analysis and experimental results demonstrate that, compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme achieves higher security while maintaining low communication and computational overhead.
Unknown authors· Italian National Conference...· 0 citations
The transition toward the Web3 ecosystem shifts digital identity management from centralized authorities toward user-controlled decentralized infrastructures. However, blockchain-based academic credentials implemented through Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) may expose privacy risks because credential activities remain publicly observable. This study presents an academic authentication framework that integrates the ERC-5192 Soulbound Token standard with Groth16 zk-SNARKs implemented using Circom, SnarkJS, and client-side WebAssembly (WASM). The framework combines Merkle-tree membership validation and a nullifier mechanism to support privacy-preserving credential verification and replay resistance. Experimental evaluation was conducted under controlled conditions using a Samsung Galaxy A24 mobile device and the Ethereum Sepolia Testnet. Across 50 authentication trials, the prototype achieved a 100% authentication success rate. The measured mean authentication latency was 6.30 s, consisting of wallet connection (0.50 s), witness generation (1.00 s), proof generation (4.59 s), and smart contract verification (0.21 s). These results demonstrate the feasibility of browser-based privacy-preserving academic credential verification under the evaluated experimental configuration, while broader device and deployment validation remain necessary for large-scale implementation.
Authentication in Web 3.0 faces a structural conflict. Systems that offer full anonymity leave no lawful way to identify a malicious actor. Systems built for accountability expose a persistent wallet address to blockchain-graph analysis, or fall back on centralized key recovery. Existing designs solve one side of this conflict at the cost of the other. This paper presents PEUAP-W3, a Privacy-Enhanced and User-centric Authentication Protocol. Its contribution is the integration of five established components into a single deployed and formally analyzed system. A Circom 2 circuit of 1579 Groth16 constraints proves four facts in a single 192-byte on-chain proof: knowledge of an opening of the session credential commitment, an SpO2 value inside an 85–100% band, single-use nonce binding, and HMAC integrity. Shamir (k = 2, n = 3) sharing distributes the identity payload across three independent relays. The coordinator reconstructs an identity only after a threshold vote has been recorded on chain. Credentials are issued as W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0 in did:key form. Four Solidity contracts verify the proof on Ethereum Sepolia. Verification costs about 241,000 gas and takes roughly 3 ms. ProVerif and Scyther find no attack under the Dolev–Yao model. A concurrency sweep to 500 simultaneous requests completes 1191 requests with zero failures at about 15.4 requests per second. A behavioral gate screens commodity abuse as a supplementary control; it is not treated as a security boundary. Against a nine-property framework, PEUAP-W3 satisfies six properties. Three remain conditional and are not verified in the current deployment: biological-origin assurance and digital replay prevention, both of which need an attested sensor; and GDPR erasure equivalence. Here, formally verified refers to the protocol models and theorems, not to the complete deployed software.
Adarsh S. V. Nair, R. Achary· Computers· 0 citations
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