A hyperelliptic curve-based authenticated key agreement scheme for unmanned aerial vehicles in cross-domain environments

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly recognized for their pivotal role in military and civilian applications, serving as essential technology for transmitting, evaluating, and gathering information. Unfortunately, this crucial process often occurs through unsecured wireless connections, exposing it to numerous cyber-physical attacks. Furthermore, UAVs’ limited onboard computing resources make it challenging to perform complex cryptographic operations. The main aim of constructing a cryptographic scheme is to provide substantial security while reducing the computation and communication costs. This article introduces an efficient and secure cross-domain Authenticated Key Agreement (AKA) scheme that uses Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC). The HECC, a modified version of ECC with a smaller key size of 80 bits, is well-suited for use in UAVs. In addition, the proposed scheme is employed in a cross-domain environment that integrates a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) at the receiving end and a Certificateless Cryptosystem (CLC) at the sending end. Integrating CLC with PKI improves network security by restricting the exposure of encryption keys only to the message’s sender and subsequent receiver. A security study employing ROM and ROR models, together with a comparative performance analysis, shows that the proposed scheme outperforms comparable existing schemes in terms of both efficiency and security.