COSIC Seminar "Identity-Privacy Paradox: How to Identify Friend or Foe...?" ( Ema Šujster, TU Delft)

COSIC Seminar - Identity-Privacy Paradox: How to Identify Friend or Foe Without Self Disclosure? - Ema Šujster (TU Delft) Drone swarms operating in contested environments, where electronic warfare, jamming, or spoofing are active threats, require authentication methods that conceal their identity, mission, and authorisation. Exposing such information risks revealing secret operations, policy decisions, or enabling adversaries to impersonate trusted devices. This is especially relevant given what is currently happening in Ukraine and the Baltic states, where drone technology is becoming increasingly more important, yet Europe lacks its own solutions. This thesis, supervised by TU Delft and NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), develops a post-quantum, privacy-preserving authentication protocol for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms. Using non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs, drones prove membership in a trusted federation without disclosing sensitive details. Attestations are hardware-bound using physical unclonable functions (PUFs), unique chip fingerprints derived from manufacturing variations. The protocol is designed to be resistant to replay attacks and quantum-capable adversaries. As part of an ongoing master’s thesis, preliminary results include a formalised NIZK relation and early implementation. Next steps involve integration into the FlyNetSim simulator, evaluation on real hardware, and formal verification of the security properties.