Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a critical role in various fields, including logistics, agriculture, and rescue operations. Effective identity authentication and key agreement schemes are vital for UAV networks to combat threats. Current schemes often employ algorithms like elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA), which are vulnerable to quantum attacks. To address this issue, we propose LIGKYX, a novel scheme combining the quantum-resistant Kyber algorithm with the hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) for enhanced security and efficiency. This scheme enables the mutual authentication between UAVs and ground stations and supports secure session key establishment protocols. Additionally, it facilitates robust authentication and key agreement among UAVs through control stations, addressing the critical challenge of quantum-resistant security in UAV networks. The proposed LIGKYX scheme operates based on the Kyber algorithm and elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) key exchange protocol, employing the HMAC and pre-computation techniques. Furthermore, a formal verification tool validated the security of LIGKYX under the Dolev–Yao threat model. Comparative analyses on security properties, communication overhead, and computational overhead indicate that LIGKYX not only matches or exceeds existing schemes but also uniquely counters quantum attacks effectively, ensuring the security of UAV communication networks with a lower time overhead for authentication and communication.

In the current 5G vehicle network system, there are security issues such as wireless intrusion, privacy leakage, and remote control. To address these challenges, an improved lightweight anonymous authentication key negotiation scheme based on certificate-less aggregate signatures is proposed and its security and efficiency are analyzed. The result shows that the scheme can offer security attributes including anonymity, traceability, and revocability, as well as effective identity authentication, and it can resist forgery attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, tampering attacks, and smart card loss attacks. Moreover, compared with similar schemes, it possesses superior security and more efficient computational efficiency and less communication overhead, thereby being more appropriate for high-speed, large-capacity, low-latency, and resource-constrained 5G vehicle network application scenarios.

Unmanned aerial vehicle mobile ad hoc networks (UAVMANETs) formed by multi-UAV self-assembling networks have rapidly developed and been widely used in many industries in recent years. However, UAVMANETs suffer from the problems of complicated key negotiations and the difficult authentication of members’ identities during key negotiations. To address these problems, this paper simplifies the authentication process by introducing a Latin square to improve the process of signature aggregation in the Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) signature scheme and to aggregate the keys negotiated via the elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) protocol into new keys. As shown through security analysis and simulations, this scheme improves the efficiency of UAVMANET authentication and key negotiation while satisfying security requirements.

Senior netizens play a unique role in crowdsourcing information obtaining, but the traditional crowdsourcing information obtaining scheme based on intermediary platform cannot satisfy the senior netizens strong reliability on anonymity. Malicious intermediary platform may leak out the privacy information of both parties. Data stored in intermediary platform may be intercepted, tampered, and fraudulently used by attackers, so smooth crowdsourcing information transactions cannot be ensured. In order to achieve secure and reliable crowdsourcing information obtaining, blockchain technology with decentralization and nontampering was used to propose a crowdsourcing information obtaining scheme, which is independent on intermediary platform. During processes of requirements releasing, information submitting, and rewarding, privacy protection techniques were used to preserve the anonymity of participants and confidentiality of data. Compared with the existing protocols, the proposed scheme has obvious advantages in privacy protection.