Expressive Attribute-Based Proxy Signature Scheme for UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks have become an essential component of modern civilian and military infrastructures. However, the communication channels between UAVs and their control entities remain vulnerable to spoofing and message tampering attacks. Although conventional digital signature schemes can ensure message authentication and integrity, they often undermine the real-time responsiveness of UAV operations and fail to protect the privacy of signers. To address these limitations, we propose an expressive attribute-based proxy signature (EABPS) scheme tailored for UAV networks. The scheme enables fine-grained authorization and authentication, ensuring that only entities whose attributes satisfy a specified access structure can generate valid proxy signatures. Furthermore, the scheme preserves signer privacy by decoupling signatures from explicit identities. Comprehensive security analysis and extensive experimental evaluation demonstrate that the proposed EABPS scheme achieves strong security guarantees while offering improved computational efficiency and expressiveness, making it a practical solution for secure communication in UAV networks.