ATS-LIA: A lightweight mutual authentication based on adaptive trust strategy in flying ad-hoc networks

With the rapid development of wireless communication and edge computing, UAV-assisted networking technology has great significance in many application scenarios such as traffic forecasting, emergency rescue, military reconnaissance. However, due to dynamic topology changes of Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANET), frequent identity authentication is easy to cause the instability of communications between UAV nodes, which makes FANET face serious identity security threats. Therefore, it is an inevitable trend to build a secure and reliable FANET. In this paper, we propose a lightweight mutual identity authentication scheme based on adaptive trust strategy for Flying Ad-hoc Networks (ATS-LIA), which selects the UAV with the highest trust value from the UAV swarm to authenticate with the ground control station (GCS). While ensuring the communication security, we reduce the energy consumption of UAV to the greatest extent, and reduce the frequent identity authentication between UAV and GCS. Through the security game verification under the random oracle model, it is proved that the proposed method can effectively resist some attacks, effectively reduce the computational overhead, and ensure the communication security of FANET. The results show that compared with the existing schemes, the proposed ATS-LIA scheme has lower computational overhead.