Owing to the on-demand deployment, low cost, and flexibility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are capable of performing tasks such as data monitoring, collection, and sharing. However, the openness of UAV wireless networks makes data susceptible to security threats such as theft, tampering, and forgery during collaborative data sharing and mission execution. Additionally, the limited resources and high mobility of UAVs further exacerbate challenges related to data security and reliability. To address these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based secure data sharing scheme for cloud-assisted multi-UAV networks. Specifically, we leverage cloud-based infrastructure to undertake the storage of massive data, significantly offloading the computational and storage burdens on the UAVs. Simultaneously, blockchain is integrated to establish immutable and traceable trust for the shared data, ensuring strong security, integrity, and retrievability under the constraints of UAV resources. On this basis, a certificateless searchable encryption algorithm is employed to eliminates traditional certificates management overhead and enables lightweight, distributed, and efficient search based on predefined keywords. Furthermore, we introduce an access control list based on geofencing to specify the data sharing permissions of UAVs, strictly limiting the data access permissions within specific area, thereby reducing the misuse or abuse of data. This scheme is proven to achieve ciphertext and trapdoor indistinguishability against keyword guessing attacks. The performance analysis indicates that the efficiency advantages of the proposed scheme become increasingly prominent as the number of UAVs increases.

With the high-speed and low-latency connection capabilities brought by the wireless communications, the performance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm for executing tasks such as emergency response, smart farming, and aerial base station has been significantly improved. As the use of UAVs becomes more prevalent in various tasks, the demand for cross-domain task allocation and operations continues to grow. Cross-domain task allocation enables the UAVs to flexibly execute tasks over a wider range, work together in different task domains, thereby improving operation efficiency. However, due to variations in management policies, authentication protocols, and security standards across various domains, to ensure the secure and reliable interoperability of UAVs across diverse domains, cross-domain authentication has become the primary line of defense for UAVs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and trusted blockchain-based cross-domain authentication scheme for UAV swarm. To achieve a lightweight authentication process, we apply certificateless authentication and avoid costly operations for resource-constrained UAVs. Additionally, the trustworthiness of UAVs and domains is evaluated through credibility, which is stored on blockchain. We analyze the theoretical security of the proposed scheme, and extensive experiments demonstrate its efficiency.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are vulnerable to interception and attacks when operated remotely without a unified and efficient identity authentication. Meanwhile, the openness of wireless communication environments potentially leads to data leakage and system paralysis. However, conventional authentication schemes in the UAV network are centered on the fixed trust boundary, ignoring potential internal threats and failing to flexibly respond to the dynamic requirements of UAV access and identity authentication. Additionally, UAVs are not subjected to periodic repetitive identity authentication, leading to difficulties in controlling access anomalies. Therefore, in this work, we consider a zero-trust framework for UAV network authentication, aiming to achieve UAV identity authentication through the principle of "never trust and always verify". We introduce a blockchain-assisted zero-trust authentication scheme, namely BAZAM, designed for multi-UAV wireless networks. In this scheme, UAVs follow a key generation approach using physical unclonable functions (PUFs), and cryptographic technique helps verify registration and access requests of UAVs. The blockchain is applied to store UAVs authentication-related information in immutable storage. Through thorough security analysis and extensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed BAZAM.

Blockchain-based IoT applications in agriculture have drawn extensive attention in recent years, allowing the implementation of smart agriculture solutions. By transmitting collected relevant data to a control center through the blockchain, corresponding regulation can be realized in agricultural production management systems. However, existing efforts for directly adopting the technique to data transmission are obstructed by several issues. The traceability of agricultural data stored in the blockchain leads to the exposure of the identity of the data collecting devices. And the tracing difficulty of completely invisible data for identity protection also exists in the smart agricultural system. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel blockchain-based smart agricultural IoT system framework for regulating the agricultural production environment through trusted data. First, the elliptic curve integrated encryption scheme (ECIES) and the group signature scheme are integrated to guarantee the traceability and identity protection of the data and equipment, respectively. Then, to enhance the security of session key transmission in the ECIES scheme, we further design an on-chain-off-chain key agreement protocol (ECIES-OOKA). In addition, we propose a novel group manager selection method based on probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) for the group signature implementation. Finally, a practical example is provided to demonstrate the group manager selection process and verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The security and performance analysis for the system framework are also presented.

The evolution of future network and control technologies has enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collaborate across diverse geographical areas and task domains, enhancing task execution efficiency through data and resource sharing. In response to the increasing demand for cross-domain task allocation and operations for UAVs, establishing robust authentication mechanisms within trusted domains has become a critical foundation for ensuring secure cross-domain access. Despite significant progress in UAV identity authentication and cross-domain access, challenges persist, such as cumbersome and inefficient processes, UAV resource limitations, and establishing trust relationships across different domains. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a dual blockchain-assisted trusted authentication scheme for UAVs' cross-domain access. Our approach utilizes a certificateless signcryption algorithm for lightweight UAV authentication, thereby eliminating the need for certificate management. Then, an efficient credit-based trust model is designed to measure the trustworthiness of data-in-transit and cross-domain entities. Furthermore, blockchain technology is introduced to store the relevant information of UAVs and credibility to assist cross-domain authentication. Theoretical security analysis and extensive simulations have been conducted, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as pivotal roles within internet of vehicles (IoV), serving as mobile base stations. However, while expanding coverage and improving mobility, the deployment of UAVs also poses a threat to the integrity and privacy of sensitive data due to open wireless communication channels in IoV. Therefore, preventing unauthorized access and data tampering is critically important between UAVs and vehicles. For the authenticity and legitimacy of the UAV certificate, existing authentication approaches may lead to significant challenges in key management overhead or dependence on a trusted third party. In this paper, a blockchain-based authentication scheme for UAV-assisted IoV system (BASUV) is proposed. This solution enables dependable UAV registration and authentication services, and permits the dynamic addition and removal. Specifically, blockchain is introduced to achieve the decentralized management and distributed trust of the UAV certificate ledger. Furthermore, to prevent information tampering and identity deception, we design CMPES, a novel combined scheme based on multiple public key generators (PKGs) for encryption and signature. Identical key pair in encryption and signature can reduce key generation and management overhead. The security and experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.