MTech Thesis — National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal
Military UAV swarms need to let drones join, leave, and get revoked on the fly — mid-mission, with no central authority easily reachable, and no room for a compromised node to linger in the group. Most existing membership protocols either assume a stable network or rely on cryptography that won’t hold up once quantum computers become practical.
My thesis addresses both problems at once. I designed a dynamic membership protocol built on a Merkle Patricia Trie, which lets the swarm track membership state efficiently and prove inclusion or exclusion without flooding the network. The cryptographic core uses NIST-standardized post-quantum primitives — ML-KEM for key encapsulation and ML-DSA for signatures — so join, leave, and revocation operations all preserve forward and backward secrecy even against an adversary with a quantum computer.
Security claims aren’t worth much without verification, so I checked the protocol three separate ways: computational security proofs, BAN logic analysis, and automated verification with the Tamarin Prover. All three came back clean — zero violations found across the authentication and key-agreement properties I modeled.
The last piece was making sure this isn’t just theoretically sound but actually deployable: I implemented and benchmarked the protocol on embedded hardware to check it can run within the power, memory, and latency constraints of real UAV platforms.
I’m currently extending this work to handle larger swarm sizes and more adversarial network conditions — packet loss, partitioning, and battery-exhaustion attacks — to see how far the protocol’s guarantees hold under real operational stress.