Cross-domain authentication for 5G-enabled UAVs: a blockchain approach

Abstract

While 5G facilitates high-speed Internet access and makes over-the-horizon control a reality for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), there are also potential security and privacy considerations, for example, authentication among drones. The centralized authentication approaches not only suffer from a single point of failure, but they are also incapable of cross-domain authentication, which complicates the cooperation of drones from different domains. To address these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based solution to achieve cross-domain authentication for 5G-enabled UAVs. Our approach employs multiple signatures based on threshold sharing to build an identity federation for collaborative domains. Reliable communication between cross-domain devices is achieved by utilizing smart contract for authentication. Our performance evaluations show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.