An Improvised Certificate-Based Proxy Signature Using Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography for Secure UAV Communications

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have enabled numerous inventive solutions to multiple problems, considerably facilitating our daily lives; however, UAVs frequently rely on an open wireless channel for communication, making them susceptible to cyber-physical threats. Also, UAVs cannot execute complicated cryptographic algorithms due to their limited onboard computing capabilities. Balancing high-security levels and minimum computation costs is imperative when developing a security solution for UAVs. Consequently, several proxy signature schemes have been proposed in the literature to fulfill these requirements. Nevertheless, many of these solutions face the issue of high computation costs, and some exhibit security vulnerabilities that could not be more feasible options for UAV communication. Considering these constraints in mind, in this article, we introduce an improvised certificate-based proxy signature scheme (ICPS), which leverages the concept of hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC) to meet the security and efficiency requirements of UAV networks. The proposed ICPS scheme offers a range of notable features, including its ability to address key escrow and secret key distribution issues. The proposed ICPS scheme’s security hardness has been evaluated using the widely known security tool, the random oracle model (ROM), proving its resilience against known and unknown cybersecurity threats. Finally, this study conducts a performance comparison of the proposed scheme against existing schemes, emphasizing its outstanding cost-efficiency. Notably, the computation cost is measured at 5.3536 ms and the communication cost at 1120 bits, substantially lower than relevant existing schemes.