Continuous Authentication for UAV Delivery Systems under Zero-Trust Security Framework

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in smart logistics to address the last-mile delivery challenge. To complete the delivery tasks, UAVs usually need to store or have access to some sensitive data such as the private information about the parcel and its receiver during their flight, and only the authenticated people or devices are authorised to access the UAV's data. However, there are many potential risks such as injection attacks and spoofing attacks that can cause data leakage. Therefore, how to preserve users' sensitive data and authenticate the identities of people and devices in the UAV delivery system has become an essential requirement under the emerging zero-Trust security framework. In this paper, to address such an issue, we propose a continuous authentication scheme for UAV delivery systems that is featured with continuous authentication, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and digital authentication using the blockchain-based Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) technique. Specifically, continuous authentication is applied to both users and UAVs in the system. The evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed continuous authentication scheme can effectively prevent various attacks and provide security analysis for UAV delivery systems.