A Lightweight PUF-Pedersen Authentication Protocol for Heterogeneous UAV Swarms

UAV swarms operate in open wireless environments. They are vulnerable to eavesdropping, device capture, and identity spoofing. Some limitations still remain in existing solutions, such as key extraction risks, reliance on ground stations, or high overhead for dynamic membership. This paper presents a lightweight decentralized authentication protocol. It integrates PUFs, Pedersen commitments, and dynamic key chains. The ground station pre-computes N parameter sets offline. During authentication, the leader first picks a challenge. Then the member proves its identity using a Pedersen commitment. Finally, both sides derive session keys from a dynamic chain. The protocol enables ground-station-free mutual authentication and dynamic joining. Mutual authentication, physical capture resistance, and forward/backward security are confirmed by the security analysis. Performance evaluation shows 33.40 ms computational overhead and 1152 bits communication overhead per authentication.