Research Article

Privacy-preserving location authentication for low-altitude UAVs: A blockchain-based approach

¹ College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, China
² Key Laboratory of Information Fusion Technology (Ministry of Education), School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China
³ College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, China

^* Corresponding author (email: wei_wang@nuaa.edu.cn)

Received: 13 September 2023
Revised: 7 December 2023
Accepted: 18 March 2024

Abstract

Efficient and trusted regulation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an essential but challenging issue in the future era of the Internet of Low-altitude Intelligence, due to the difficulties in UAVs’ identity recognition and location matching, potential for falsified information reporting, etc. To address this challenging issue, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based UAV location authentication scheme, which employs a distance bounding protocol to establish a location proof, ensuring the authenticity of UAV positions. To preserve the privacy of UAVs, anonymous certificates and zero-knowledge proof are used. The security of the proposed scheme is analyzed. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed scheme.