Biometric and smart contract enabled secure data sharing in drone-assisted battlefield systems

Surveillance drones in intelligent battlefield systems capture sensitive data but face severe security threats, including eavesdropping, tampering, Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing, and drone hijacking. To counter these, we propose a secure data-sharing protocol integrating smart contracts and biometric-based multi-factor authentication within a drone-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) environment. The protocol leverages decentralized fog servers for real-time, low-latency communication while ensuring robust defense against attacks like impersonation and replay. It supports dynamic drone integration and secure credential updates, addressing key limitations in existing schemes. Security is rigorously validated via the Real-or-Random (RoR) model, Scyther tool, and informal analysis. Comparative results confirm that our protocol outperforms prior solutions in terms of security, scalability, energy efficiency, and computational overhead.