Secure Real-time Data Access Using Two-Factor Authentication Scheme for the Internet of Drones

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is a distributed network control system that mainly manages unmanned aerial vehicle access to controlled airspace and provides navigation between so-called nodes. Securing the transmission of real-time information from the nodes in these applications is essential. The limited drone nodes, data storage, computing and communication capabilities necessitate the need to design an effective and secure authentication scheme. Recently, research has proposed remote user authentication and the key agreement on IoD and claimed that their schemes satisfied all security issues in these networks. However, we found that their schemes may lead to losing access to the drone system due to the corruption of using a key management system and make the system completely unusable. To solve this drawback, we propose a lightweight and anonymous two-factor authentication scheme for drones. The proposed scheme is based on an asymmetric cryptographic method to provide a secure system and is more suitable than the other existing schemes by securing real-time information. Moreover, the comparison shows that the proposed scheme minimized the complexity of communication and computation costs.