This paper thus addresses a problem with pressing consequences: the rise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms in mission-critical and infrastructure-less environments is demanding secure, scalable, and decentralized authentication. Current protocols heavily lean on centralized trust models or having static credentials, neither of which is fit for highly mobile & P2P UAV networks. AeroProof is presented, a lightweight and decentralized mutual authentication protocol based on mobility-aware ephemeral keys. Each UAV autonomously produces secure elliptic curve credentials from its relatively short location, speed, and motion orientation (a single flight only), leading to a unique 'motion ticket'. The credentials are afterwards employed for a mutual authentication at the application level that provides strong security properties such as forward secrecy, session unlinkability, immunity against impersonation, replay, and wormhole attacks without requiring long-term identities or certificate authorities. We show that AeroProof achieves an up to 64% faster authentication time, a 35% less communication overhead, and consumes over 50% less memory compared with recent ECC- and blockchain-based solutions. This work has demonstrated the practical usefulness of AeroProof as an authentic framework to enable secure and efficient decentralized swarm operations.
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