Blockchain-enabled secure communication for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks

While 5G can provide high-speed Internet connectivity and over-the-horizon control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), authentication becomes a key security component in 5G-enabled UAVs. This is due to fact that the communicating entities in the network mostly uses unsecured communication channel to exchange critical surveillance data. Authentication thus plays a crucial role in the 5G-enabled UAV network, providing a range of security services such as credential privacy, Session-Key (SK) security, and secure mutual authentication. However, transparency, anonymity, traceability and centralized control are few major security requirements that cannot be fulfilled by the traditional authentication schemes. One of the upcoming technologies that can provide a solution for present centralized 5G-enabled UAV network is blockchain-based authentication scheme. Motivated from aforementioned discussion, this paper presents a Permissioned Blockchain empowered Secure Authentication and Key Agreement framework in 5G-enabled UAVs. In this framework, first an authentication phase between UAV-to-UAV, UAV-to-Edge Server (ES) and Edge-to-Cloud Server (CS) supporting mutual authentication and key agreement is proposed. The authenticated surveillance data collected from UAV is used by the peer-to-peer CS for transaction verification, block creation and addition using smart contract-based consensus mechanism. The practical implementation of framework shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.