AERO-SC: PRIVACY-PRESERVING POST-QUANTUM SIGNCRYPTION WITH ERASURE RATCHETING FOR LIGHTWEIGHT INTERNET-OF-DRONES ACCESS

Abstract

Post-quantum drone authentication is expensive if a lattice signature and key encapsulation are repeated on every telemetry packet symmetric-only sessions, however, do not recover after key exposure and usually expose a stable identity to the edge. This article presents AERO-SC, a post-quantum signcryption and erasure-ratchet protocol for Internet-of-Drones (IoD) access. A mission authority pre-authorizes one-use ML-KEM-768 receiver capsules and unlinkable window pseudonyms. A drone signs its real identity, nonce, and payload with ML-DSA-65, then encrypts the signature and identity under the encapsulated secret. A 128-bit per-window HMAC lets an edge reject unauthorised ciphertext before ground-control public-key work compromising this filter cannot forge or decrypt the inner signcryption. The ground-control station (GCS) consumes and erases the receiver secret after one accepted checkpoint, returns a ChaCha20-Poly1305 confirmation, and establishes independent HMAC-SHA-384 chain-key ratchets. Re-anchoring every  packets gives past-packet secrecy after current-chain exposure and healing at the next uncompromised checkpoint the symmetric ratchet alone is not claimed to heal. Scyther 1.3.0 reports all 12 secrecy, agreement, and synchronization claims Ok Tamarin 1.12.0 verifies ten executable checkpoint/ratchet lemmas, including injective acceptance and post-erasure secrecy. An executable Node.js implementation reports median 256-byte checkpoint signcryption/unsigncryption times of 11.369/3.592 ms and steady seal/open times of 0.020/0.020 ms on an Intel Xeon 8573C host. One checkpoint plus 255 telemetry packets averages 319.98 bytes per payload, 15.33 below per-packet checkpointing. A 1,350-run seeded discrete-event study is also reported with raw data and confidence intervals.