A Featherweight Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Internet of Drones Applications

The Internet of Drones (IoD) will have revolutionized civil and commercial applications, in much the similar way that the Internet of Things (IoT) transformed the way information is exchanged with other devices and systems over the Internet. The drones are generally considered to have constrained resources, which make them less compatible with complicated algorithms and more prone to attacks. Moreover, the IoD applications are facing information security and privacy challenges in the cyber-threat environment, where the adversary could intercept communicating messages and compromise their confidentiality or integrity. Consequently, the security protocols which are designed for IoD applications should not only provide desirable security guarantees, but also be resource-efficient. Existing authenticated key exchange protocols can authenticate the identities of communication parties and realize the exchange of session key, however, they either incur high communication overhead, suffer from non-negligible computational cost, or have inherent security design flaws. Thus, these approaches are not suitable for resource-constrained drones involved in critical IoD applications. To address the above challenges, this paper presents a featherweight authentication and key agreement scheme (hereafter referred to as fwAKA) for IoD applications based on elliptic curve cryptography, physical unclonable function, hash function, and XOR operation. The fwAKA only requires two handshakes to achieve authenticated key agreement. We prove that the fwAKA is perfectly secure in the adversarial setting through the security verification using the AVISPA. We set up a simulation environment, implement the fwAKA and its counterparts, and conduct performance evaluation in terms of communication overhead and running time. Experimental results indicate that not only is the fwAKA robust against well-known attacks but also it is more resource-efficient than its opponents.

I. Introduction

The drone market has left the nascent stage and broken into the mainstream. No one can deny the fact that the drone industry has seen a spike in market growth in the last couple of years, and the global drone market is estimated to surpass USD 63.5 billion by 2025 [1]. In order to enable heterogeneous drones to autonomously connect over the Internet, the Internet of Drones (IoD) paradigm [2] has been created to generate a network of interconnections among drones as well as ground base stations. The IoD paradigm is widely envisioned as the enabling framework that supports various emerging and potential applications such as target tracking [3], parcel delivery [4], precision agriculture [5], etc. In the era of pervasive intelligence, we envision that the IoD technology will have the potential to transform every aspect of our lives for good within a very short period [6].