PAD-CGKA: Privacy-Protection and Anonymity Dynamic Certificateless Group Key Agreement Scheme in UAV Networks

With the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are demonstrating immense application potential across various domains. However, large-scale and highly mobile UAV networks face significant challenges, such as limited computational and communication resources, severe security threats, and privacy concerns, while existing data transmission protocols exacerbate these issues with high resource consumption and inadequate security, hindering their widespread deployment and efficient operation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving and anonymous dynamic certificateless group key agreement scheme, referred to as PAD-CGKA. PAD-CGKA combines both symmetric and asymmetric group key agreement protocols, enabling efficient and secure communication among multiple group members within UAV networks while supporting dynamic key updates as UAV joins or leaves. Additionally, PAD-CGKA ensures privacy protection for UAVs, enables efficient tracing of malicious UAVs, and meets several critical security properties such as anonymity, perfect forward and backward security. Performance evaluations demonstrate that, compared to existing schemes, PAD-CGKA improves computational efficiency by approximately 26.30% and communication efficiency by about 52.43%, making it well-suited for highly mobile and resource-constrained UAV networks.