Achieving Security and Efficiency with a Signcryption-Based Key Agreement Scheme and Location Privacy in FANETs

Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) composed of highly mobile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed in mission-critical applications. However, the open wireless medium, high mobility, and resource constraints of UAVs expose FANETs to severe security and privacy threats, particularly at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. Existing authentication and key agreement schemes often suffer from high computational overhead and insufficient protection against advanced attacks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Lightweight Key Agreement Scheme (LWKAS) based on signcryption using Hyper Elliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC) and one-way cryptographic hash functions. The proposed scheme integrates MAC-layer security while simultaneously ensuring secure authentication, confidentiality, and location privacy through the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). The security analysis demonstrates that LWKAS resists multiple attacks, including Man-In-The-Middle (MITM), replay, impersonation, Ephemeral Secret Leakage (ESL), cloning, desynchronization, and DoS attacks. The proposed scheme is implemented in NS-3 and evaluated against existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of authentication delay, communication overhead, and computational cost. The results demonstrate that LWKAS achieves significantly lower computational complexity and communication overhead while providing stronger security guarantees suitable for resource-constrained FANET environments.