A privacy-preserving access control protocol for 6G supported intelligent UAV networks

Due to their autonomous operation, high mobility, and real-time communication capabilities, 6G-supported Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (6G-UAVs) (i.e., drones) are increasingly being utilized to enhance data collection and management in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). Despite their manifold benefits, 6G-supported UAV-based ITS (6G-U-ITS) faces unique security challenges beyond conventional cyber and physical threats. These include real-time authentication, impersonation attacks, physical tampering or cloning and protection against identity spoofing in highly dynamic environments. For instance, an attacker may steal a drone and use its identity to send authenticated malicious messages to the ITS, causing road accidents. Therefore, a secure authentication scheme must ensure resilience against UAV identity theft and unauthorized access while maintaining low-latency and computational efficiency to support the stringent real-time security requirements of 6G-U-ITS. Existing authentication schemes are not specifically designed to address these challenges, making it imperative to develop a lightweight and robust authentication mechanism tailored for 6G-U-ITS. Moreover, most of the existing protocols are vulnerable to physical tampering and impersonation attacks and also require high computation overhead. In this paper, to mitigate these limitations and satisfy the aforementioned requirements, we propose a secure access control protocol for 6G-U-ITS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first security solution in the literature that can achieve security against UAVs physical attacks. Furthermore, we justify the robustness of the designed protocol against potential attacks through detailed formal and informal security assessment. Via testbed experiments, we show that our protocol achieves 20.66% and 22.82% higher efficiency on communication and computation overhead, respectively, compared to other contemporary competing protocols.