Engineering decentralized, ad-hoc post-quantum communication fabrics for autonomous drone swarms operating without central ground stations.
Drone swarms operating in search-and-rescue, agriculture, or military reconnaissance form dynamic Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs). Nodes join and leave the network continuously as drones maneuver, requiring high-speed peer-to-peer cryptographic authentication without dependency on high-latency cloud servers.
We detail scalable group key agreement protocols based on Tree-KEM and hybrid ML-KEM, allowing dozens of autonomous drones to negotiate a shared swarm encryption key in under 150 milliseconds. When an individual drone is disabled or captured, the group key is instantly refreshed, excluding the compromised node.
Preventing adversaries from injecting ghost drones into the swarm using distributed cryptographic consensus and physical distance-bounding protocols anchored in UAVTPM hardware.