Robust and lightweighted mutual authentication scheme for drone swarm networks

Drones are being increasingly adopted across both military and commercial domains to serve remote rendering, monitoring, surveillance and service delivery operations. Drone swarms comprise multiple drones operating cohesively as a unified system to provide collective services. Each drone in a swarm must establish mutual trust with other drones to ensure authenticity in data exchange and also to prevent the compromise of a mission. Inter-drone communication links are vulnerable to cyber threats, including unauthorized access and spoofing. While most existing studies focus on authentication mechanisms for drone-to-stationary base stations, very little research work has explored inter-drone authentication protocols specifically designed for decentralized topologies. We propose a lightweight authentication scheme for inter-drone communication that leverages a dynamic challenge–response mechanism, hash-based message authentication code and authenticated encryption to facilitate mutual authentication. We validate the efficacy of the proposed protocol through extensive informal analysis based on the Dolev–Yao and the Canetti–Krawczyk threat models and through Scyther and random oracle-based formal analysis. We also compare the protocol’s performance with state-of-the-art authentication schemes to demonstrate its efficacy and efficiency. The results obtained demonstrate the supremacy of the protocol in cost-effective threat prevention for swarms of drones.