Currently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) groups can quickly build a multi-hop transmission network, which have been widely utilized in emergency communication scenarios to perform search and rescue, environmental monitoring, personnel positioning, rapid networking, etc. In such emergency rescue situations, strict demands on real-time communication, security, and minimal resource consumption become paramount. Higher requirements for security, bandwidth, and real-time performance necessitate a secure and lightweight data transmission protocol. Additionally, due to the lack of personnel supervision in these scenarios, the probability of malicious nodes increases. Therefore, it is essential to quickly and proximally block malicious nodes’ data to prevent it from affecting subsequent network propagation, and to accurately identify the malicious nodes. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a traceable, lightweight, and secure data transmission protocol for UAV multi-hop networks in emergency rescue scenarios. The proposed protocol can verify the integrity of data transmitted by a large number of nodes in real time, detect erroneous transmissions, and trace malicious users. Experimental results show that our protocol consistently outperforms the comparison schemes in terms of computational overhead. Moreover, in scenarios involving smaller groups (m=5) and fewer hops (n=4), it exhibits significantly lower communication bandwidth overhead than the reference methods. Security analysis using BAN logic and the formal verification tool Scyther indicates that the proposed scheme meets security requirements. Additionally, comparative analysis results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is highly effective and outperforms other related schemes under the unique constraints of emergency rescue scenarios, where rapid, secure decision-making and data transmission are critical.

5G Proximity-based Service (ProSe) UE-to-Network (U2N) Relay can help a remote 5G User Equipment (UE) out of coverage connect with the network. The 3GPP committee has provided the standard Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocols to achieve secure access for a Remote UE and establish a secure link between a Remote UE and a U2N Relay. However, the security of these AKA protocols is a remaining issue. At first, we present two detailed 5G ProSe AKA protocols over Control Plane (CP) and User Plane (UP) for U2N Relay communication referring to multiple related standards, then transform the security requirements for 5G ProSe U2N Relay communication as formal security properties, and provide two formal faithful security models for the 5G ProSe AKA protocols. We adopt the state-of-the-art formal verification tool Tamarin to achieve automated security analysis on two models through new proof strategies, and then find some significant and unexpected flaws. Finally, we propose corresponding measures that have least impact on standards based on the analysis on the attacks. Given that the version of Release 17 (R17) of the 3GPP standard has just been frozen, our work can provide a reference for the subsequent evolution of the protocols in 5G ProSe.

Device-to-device (D2D) communication, as a traffic offloading technology in the fifth-generation (5G) network, can be widely used in several scenarios to provide 5G characteristics of higher speed, lower latency, and larger capacity. D2D data transmission over wireless channels among mobile devices is vulnerable to security threats and privacy violations from third parties and relay nodes. However, academia and industry have yet to propose relevant schemes or standards for D2D relay data transmission scenarios. We first propose a generic construction for D2D relay communication in this paper. Then, a concrete anonymous and secure D2D data transmission scheme with trajectory tracking is presented based on Chebyshev polynomials, hash-based message authentication code, and symmetric encryption. We employ a formal verification tool -Tamarin, modal logic analysis -BAN logic, and informal security analysis to demonstrate the security features of the proposed scheme. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can achieve desirable efficiency compared with other related schemes. Finally, we developed an APP‘, D2DWatchmen’, to simulate the whole protocol and test its robustness and real execution time, where the result shows good availability and effectiveness.

As an outlook of the terrestrial network, the flexible Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-aided satellite-terrestrial integration network would have numerous prospective applications such as service enhancement, maritime communication, military, and emergency communication, which is getting significant attention. However, the public and open-access network must result in various imperative risks including impersonation, sensitive data, and privacy disclosure. Due to several unique characteristics including long transmission distance, unstable communication environment, resource-limited and highly dynamic characteristics of UAVs, diversified terminals that lack the ability of accessing the satellite and may be resource-limited, there are new challenges for the access authentication process in the UAV-Aided Satellite-Terrestrial Integration Networks with 5G. In this paper, we present a novel Physically Unclonable Function (PUF)-based access authentication scheme consisting of two access authentication protocols for the UAV and the ground terminals like 5G User Equipments (UEs), respectively. Two access authentication protocols for the drone and the terminals can both achieve mutual authentication, key agreement, and privacy protection with distinct advantages of no need to store secret key and supporting physical attack resistance. Finally, we propose an efficient handover authentication protocol executed by the ground terminals when the UAV is required to switch. We employ different security analysis tools to analyze the security of all proposed protocols, as well as present informal security analysis on various security properties. The performance comparison and evaluations show our protocols have better advantages.

With the gradual commercialization of the fifth-generation (5G) network, the narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system would have potential and prospective applications in future relying on the infrastructure. Meanwhile, predictably, there are several security requirements to be satisfied, including concurrent access authentication for massive devices, identity privacy protection, physical attack resistance, application traffic security, etc. In this article, we present a novel group authentication and data transmission scheme using the physically unclonable function (PUF) for NB-IoT in which the output of PUF is viewed as shared root key to achieve the mutual authentication along with key agreement. By this scheme, a Group Leader is employed to aggregate and relay authentication information and, thus, it reduces the signaling cost and communication cost followed by activating attach request messages from a sea of devices. The network side as well can surely find fake ones through individual truncated authentication code and detect honest devices with high probability when aggregated authentication code is invalid. Furthermore, the revised security model and the formal verification tool Scyther are employed to evaluate the security of the scheme. Finally, performance analysis results show that our solution has the desired efficiency.