Authentication Schemes for Internet of Drones: Taxonomy, Threat Models, and Future Directions

The Internet of Drones (IoD) has lately acquired popularity because to its flexibility to a broad variety of difficult situations. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be utilised efficiently in surveillance, agriculture, search-and-rescue operations, and mission-critical services. Drones have a lot of technological and practical benefits, including high mobility, the potential to increase cellular coverage regions, and the capacity to explore difficult sites. Since the majority of applications employing drones in the IoD are real-time based, Users want instantaneous access to the services provided by the deployed drones operating within a specified flight area. To solve this major problem in the IoD, we need a efficient and secure user authentication protocol that would allow an authorized user, such an ambulance driver, to have immediate access to data from a nearby drone. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of authentication schemes for IoD communication. We discuss the applications in IoD, vulnerabilities, attacks, and challenges, with a focus on the existing authentication protocols, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the various techniques. This paper also explores the area of authentication and the possibility for developing lightweight and new IoD authentication protocols.