Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme Enabled by Stateless Blockchain for UAV Networks

Table 1

Classification and comparison of authentication methods.

Method	Papers	Overhead and shortcomings
Threshold secret sharing	[3, 5, 6]	High computational and communication overheads; unable to defend against black hole attacks launched by malicious nodes with powerful resources.
Certificate chain	[7–9]	High storage and communication overheads; there are key escrow issues and risk of impersonation attacks. Inconsistencies in the certificate chain across nodes lead to authentication failures. As the size of the network increases, the cost of managing and maintaining the certificate store increases.
Certificate-less public key	[10–13]	High computational and communication overheads; man-in-the-middle attack risk during key negotiation, key distribution mostly requires establishment of secure channels.
Traditional blockchain	[15–17]	High storage and computational overheads, “storage explosion,” inefficient consensus, and limited system scale.
Stateless blockchain	[21–24]	Storage overhead very low; nodes are dynamically added and removed, resulting in frequent recalculations of the accumulator.