ToAM: A Task-oriented Authentication Model for UAVs Based on Blockchain

Abstract The pervasive collaboration of groups of UAVs has become vogue and popularized due to the reduced cost and widely adoption of these gadgets. It is believed that such collaboration will benefits numerous scenarios like the disaster monitoring and combat in battlefield. In these scenarios where UAVs collaborate to carry out tasks, the efficient and reliable authentication between UAVs is imperative. However, there are some major challenges hindering the authentication, including UAVs' resource limitation, joint using of cross-domain drones, and weakly connected task network environment. Therefore, a novel Task-oriented Authentication Model for UAVs Based on Blockchain (ToAM) is proposed. The framework takes advantage of the tamper-resistant properties of the blockchain, and uses smart contract to achieve decentralized identity authentication and reduce the computing cost of UAVs. Analyzing results demonstrates that the authentication model can achieve lightweight, offline secure identity authentication for UAVs.