A Robust Lightweight Authentication and Key Establishment Protocol for Internet of Drone Networks

Abstract

The internet of drones (IoD) is a growing technology utilized in a diverse range of applications, including surveillance data and images sharing, smart cities, industrial sectors, and transportation systems. In order to guarantee secure access to real-time data from drones, numerous researchers have developed various protocols for authentication and key agreement. However, there are a number of security and performance issues with these protocols. In this paper, we introduce a robust lightweight authentication and key establishment protocol that provides higher security levels for IoD environment. The suggested protocol enables authorized users to get real-time information from drones in an IoD environment. It incorporates cost-effective cryptographic operations such as XOR operations and hash functions, as well as fuzzy extractor procedures for user biometric verification. A thorough security analysis demonstrates that our proposed work enhances functioning of security features and is resistant to common attacks such as privileged insider threats, device capture, user impersonation, server impersonation, drone impersonation, and desynchronization attacks. The analytical analysis shows that the proposed protocol minimizes computational and communicational complexities for both the user and the drone when compared to related ones. The proposed protocol is implemented in Java’s Big-Integer class to ensure its appropriateness in a real-time environment.