Blockchain-Based Data Acquisition with Privacy Protection in UAV Cluster Network

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) self-organizing network is composed of multiple UAVs with autonomous capabilities according to a certain structure and scale, which can quickly and accurately complete complex tasks such as path planning, situational awareness, and information transmission. Due to the openness of the network, the UAV cluster is more vulnerable to passive eavesdropping, active interference, and other attacks, which makes the system face serious security threats. This paper proposes a Blockchain-Based Data Acquisition (BDA) scheme with privacy protection to address the data privacy and identity authentication problems in the UAV-assisted data acquisition scenario. Each UAV cluster has an aggregate unmanned aerial vehicle (AGV) that can batch-verify the acquisition reports within its administrative domain. After successful verification, AGV adds its signcrypted ciphertext to the aggregation and uploads it to the blockchain for storage. There are two chains in the blockchain that store the public key information of registered entities and the aggregated reports, respectively. The security analysis shows that the BDA construction can protect the privacy and authenticity of acquisition data, and effectively resist a malicious key generation center and the public-key substitution attack. It also provides unforgeability to acquisition reports under the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) assumption. The performance analysis demonstrates that compared with other schemes, the proposed BDA construction has lower computational complexity and is more suitable for the UAV cluster network with limited computing power and storage capacity.