{
  "abstract": "Cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms require secure transaction-level admission decisions when tasks, relay roles, control privileges, or mission assets are transferred between aircraft. Existing authentication and intrusion-detection mechanisms address complementary aspects of security and motivate integrating a mandatory protocol check with post-authentication behavioral and corroborative assessment. This paper introduces TriTrust, a risk-aware three-factor trust-fusion architecture that enforces a mandatory protocol-admission gate, followed by logistic fusion of traffic-behavior and competence-weighted witness scores for gate-passing candidates. The framework further incorporates validation-fitted score mapping and robust federated maintenance of the witness classifier. Evaluation on a constructed proxy-handover benchmark derived from public UAV cyber-physical records using cyber-condition-derived labels, sampled gate outcomes, and simulated witness views demonstrates that the modeled gate provides the dominant control over false acceptance: removing it increases mean seed-level raw-score false-acceptance rate (FAR) from 0.43% to 9.62%. Across five prespecified resamplings of the same source corpus, the isotonic-mapped full pipeline attains a mean seed-level area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.9926, a mean FAR of 0.83%, and a mean false-rejection rate (FRR) of 1.75%. Under 20% scaled sign-reversal poisoning, coordinatewise median aggregation maintains mean witness-classifier accuracy of 0.8552, compared with 0.2920 for sample-size-weighted averaging. Feature-space stress tests further show that false acceptance under learned-input manipulation remains limited by the modeled gate, whereas gate bypass combined with learned-factor compromise produces high false-acceptance rates. These results characterize the contributions and failure boundary of protocol gating, post-gate trust fusion, score mapping, and robust federated maintenance within the constructed benchmark.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Department of Software Engineering, Kocaeli University, İzmit 41001, Türkiye",
    "Interdisciplinary Research Center for Construction and Building Materials, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM), Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia",
    "Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Business and Technology, Jeddah 21361, Saudi Arabia",
    "Interdisciplinary Research Center for Intelligent Secure Systems (IRC-ISS), King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM), Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia",
    "College of Applied Computer Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 8,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Mustafa Ghaleb",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2842-6532"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Zaafir Riaz"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Radhwan A. Saleh",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-9945-3672"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Zead Saleh"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        3
      ],
      "name": "Ibrahim Althamary",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-7918-0136"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Sajjad Ahmad Khan",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-0787-1357"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Kerem Küçük",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-2621-634X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        4
      ],
      "name": "Hamdi Altaheri",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-1780-6388"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/fnhs7q95w3g79.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.3390/math14203817",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "fnhs7q95w3g79",
  "issns": [
    "2227-7390"
  ],
  "landing_url": "https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/14/20/3817",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "openalex",
      "3312|Access Control and Trust"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7223032827",
  "pdf_url": null,
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-20",
  "publisher": "MDPI AG",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/fnhs7q95w3g79.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:18:29Z",
      "native_id": "10.3390/math14203817",
      "source": "crossref",
      "url": "https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/14/20/3817"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "mathematics",
      "origin": "issn:2227-7390",
      "subfield": "general"
    }
  ],
  "title": "TriTrust: Risk-Aware Three-Factor Trust Fusion for Secure UAV Handover Admission",
  "title_text": "TriTrust: Risk-Aware Three-Factor Trust Fusion for Secure UAV Handover Admission",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:18:29Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/fnhs7q95w3g79",
  "venue": "Mathematics",
  "versions": []
}