August 25, 2025Open Access

A Post-Quantum Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Drone Swarms

LHLinlin HeEast China University of Technology MZMeng ZhaoXi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications XWXu An WangRenji Hospital

Key Points

The proposed scheme ensures secure communications with low resource overhead in drone swarms, vital for post-quantum security.
Experimental results confirm the integration of Kyber-based group key agreements and lightweight authentication methods.
By employing a sparse Merkle tree, dynamic joining and leaving of UAVs is efficiently managed while enhancing security.
The approach highlights the importance of adapting authentication methods for varying application scenarios in drone communications.

Abstract

With the continuous development of quantum computing technology, the traditional public key cryptosystem is facing severe security challenges, especially in the resource-constrained UAV swarm communication scenario. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes a secure communication scheme for the post-quantum era, which combines the Kyber-based group key agreement mechanism and the lightweight identity authentication system constructed by sparse Merkle tree (SMT). The system is initialized by the edge node, and supports the dynamic joining and leaving of the UAV through the authentication and key management mechanism. To meet the security and performance requirements in different application scenarios, we design and integrate two mainstream post-quantum signature schemes to provide flexible identity authentication options. Experimental results show that the scheme has low resource overhead while ensuring security, which is suitable for the actual communication deployment of post-quantum UAV swarm.

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