LiteWTAKA: Authenticating UAV-GCS and UAV–UAV communication using secure and lightweight mechanism based on PUF

Abstract

The adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Drone technology is increasing from miliary to civilian domains because of its effectiveness in performing difficult operations. UAV communicates with Ground Control Station (GCS) in presence of open wireless channel which is insecure. The communication is susceptible to various security attacks because of open nature of wireless channel. A number of traditional cryptographic solutions are provided to mitigate these attacks, but there is need of large amount of computational resources. The UAVs are equipped with limited resources, so a lightweight mechanism is required. So, in this paper, a lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol is proposed that makes use of Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) technology along with the hash function and XOR operations to secure the communication. The proposed scheme ensures the robust authentication along with session key update mechanism. The security of proposed mechanism is validated and verified by formal security analysis using Scyther simulation tool, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and Real-or-Random (ROR) model. The comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the scheme effectively mitigates known security attacks. The efficiency of proposed protocol is demonstrated by performing the experiments and by comparing it with the state-of-the-art schemes in terms of computation cost, communication cost, energy consumption and security requirements.