G2CAIUN: A novel Genus-2 curve-based authentication for secure data transmission in IoT-based UAV networks

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem are the networks which are used to collect, process and share data in real-time to support applications like smart agriculture, environment monitoring and disaster management. The communication among UAVs, GCS (Ground Control Station) and External Users (EU) is vulnerable to adversary attacks such as man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping, replay, session key disclosure, impersonation and physical tampering attacks in smart cities scenarios. Most existing studies are based on securing communication between EU and UAV through GCS but do not come across the UAV–UAV and UAV–GCS authentication solutions, which are crucial for UAVs. Therefore, to overcome these problems, this paperwork comes with a lightweight and provable secure mutual authentication scheme which utilises the Hyperelliptic curve (HC) of Genus-2, one-way hash function, XOR operation, random tokens, anonymous identity and timestamps for secure data transmission in EU–GCS–UAV, UAV–GCS and UAV–UAV environment. The proposed scheme is also secured with a lightweight Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) operation to prevent physical capture attacks. The solution provides high security without the intensive computation (2.5 ms) and communication overhead (1456 bits) compared to existing schemes, which rely on bilinear-pairing, quadratic residue theory and elliptic curves of Genus-1. The scheme is formally verified using the Random Oracle Model (ROM) and Scyther under the Dolev–Yao (DY) and Canetti and Krawczyk (CK) adversary models. The informal analysis shows the provable security assessment to make IoT-based UAV networks robust.