Towards Reliable Service Provisioning for Dynamic UAV Clusters in Low-Altitude Economy Networks

2025-09-07

AI Summary

To address challenges in low-altitude economic networks—including inefficient authentication for dynamic UAV swarms, cross-swarm privacy leakage, and insufficient forward/backward secrecy of session keys—this paper proposes a lightweight, privacy-enhancing framework for batch authentication and key update. Methodologically, it integrates batch access authentication, cross-swarm anonymous unlinkable authentication, and a robust session key agreement protocol. Its key contribution is the first design of an efficient, scalable authentication scheme tailored to dynamic UAV swarms, coupled with end-to-end key security throughout the key lifecycle. Experimental evaluation in OMNeT++ demonstrates that, compared to baseline schemes, the framework reduces authentication latency by 82.8%–90.8%, decreases node energy consumption by 37.6%–72.6%, and maintains high adaptability and stability across multi-scale swarm configurations.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Authentication, authorization, and access control
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) cluster services are crucial for promoting the low-altitude economy by enabling scalable, flexible, and adaptive aerial networks. To meet diverse service demands, clusters must dynamically incorporate a New UAVs (NUAVs) or an Existing UAV (EUAV). However, achieving sustained service reliability remains challenging due to the need for efficient and scalable NUAV authentication, privacy-preserving cross-cluster authentication for EUAVs, and robust protection of the cluster session key, including both forward and backward secrecy. To address these challenges, we propose a Lightweight and Privacy-Preserving Cluster Authentication and Session Key Update (LP2-CASKU) scheme tailored for dynamic UAV clusters in low-altitude economy networks. LP2-CASKU integrates an efficient batch authentication mechanism that simultaneously authenticates multiple NUAVs with minimal communication overhead. It further introduces a lightweight cross-cluster authentication mechanism that ensures EUAV anonymity and unlinkability. Additionally, a secure session key update mechanism is incorporated to maintain key confidentiality over time, thereby preserving both forward and backward secrecy. We provide a comprehensive security analysis and evaluate LP2-CASKU performance through both theoretical analysis and OMNeT++ simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the baseline, LP2-CASKU achieves a latency reduction of 82.8%-90.8% by across different UAV swarm configurations and network bitrates, demonstrating strong adaptability to dynamic communication environments. Besides, under varying UAV swarm configurations, LP2-CASKU reduces the energy consumption by approximately 37.6-72.6%, while effectively supporting privacy-preserving authentication in highly dynamic UAV cluster environments.

Problem

• Efficient authentication for new UAVs in clusters
• Privacy-preserving cross-cluster authentication for existing UAVs
• Secure session key management with forward-backward secrecy

Innovation

• Lightweight privacy-preserving authentication scheme
• Efficient batch authentication for multiple UAVs
• Secure session key update with secrecy