Blockchain-based entity access control scheme for ubiquitous UAV swarm tasks

Distributed ground stations are capable of realizing ubiquitous control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), breaking the restriction of limited network coverage of traditional central ground stations and improving the execution efficiency of complex tasks. However, with the increase of entities in the system architecture and the rapid changes in the authority of entities, the existing access control mechanism can no longer meet the needs of ubiquitous UAV tasks, and entities in the network and UAV tasks face identity spoofing, false data injection and other attacks. In this paper, we construct a blockchain-based entity access control scheme for ubiquitous UAV swarm tasks (BAC-UAV) to ensure data security and identity security during UAV task execution. Specifically, a blockchain-based UAV access control scheme is designed, in which the private cloud (PC) maintains a consortium blockchain to register and protect entities. The controller in the distributed control network and the UAV in the flight ad-hoc network (FANET) can mutually authenticate and confirm the legal identity of the entity based on the data in the blockchain. In addition, for the task, the dynamic task data group key and the dynamic identity group key are designed based on the homomorphic algorithm to secure the UAV task data and UAV identity respectively when the UAV members change in the task formation. The experimental results show that the computational costs and communication costs of BAC-UAV are reduced by approximately \(21.7\%\) $21.7\%$ and \(2.8\%\) $2.8\%$ , respectively, compared to the comparison methods.