B-UAVM: A Blockchain-Supported Secure Multi-UAV Task Management Scheme

The advent of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm technology brings possibilities to help humans complete tasks in no man's land, such as deserts and rainforests. However, UAV network faces many cyber threats, where attackers can impersonate legitimate entities or tamper with UAV task data. For identity security, most of the existing methods use centralized authentication schemes, which have a single point of failure problem. For data security, the existing methods only secure the task data in the ground system, ignoring the data security in the air network. Therefore, the existing methods are not suitable for ubiquitous UAV scenarios. Blockchain secures data security while eliminating the single point of failure problem, and has been widely used in distributed scenarios. In this article, to secure entity identity and task data, we propose a blockchain-supported secure multi-UAV task management scheme (B-UAVM). Specifically, a three-layer blockchain structure is constructed to secure multitasks, and achieve ubiquitous control of UAV formations. Besides, six types of blocks and three types of transactions are designed to achieve safe processing and storage of task data and entity information. Furthermore, an improved practical byzantine fault tolerance (IPBFT) consensus mechanism and a UAV-formation-action-considered ground station consensus mechanism (UFAGS) are introduced in the Server Network and Ground Control Network, respectively, to accelerate the consensus. The experimental results show that the number of transactions generated per second (TPS) of B-UAVM is about 0.5× and 3.7× of the existing method when the block size or the number of blockchain nodes increases, respectively.