A Lightweight Aggregate Authentication Protocol for Internet of Drones

The Internet of Drones (IoD), an innovative aerial-ground communication architecture, has quickly became the driving force for various civilian applications (e.g., body temperature detecting drones during the global pandemic of coronavirus disease). In the IoD, a fleet of drones are deployed over an area of interest, collect task-specific data, and then deliver them to the ground station for further data exploration and analysis. To fully exploit the potential of IoD in today's dynamic and evolving cyber-threat environment, the security and efficiency challenges existing in the IoD communications should be well addressed. Some researchers have developed security mechanisms to enable the authentication between the ground station and the drones in the IoD systems. Nonetheless, those schemes mainly focus on the security aspect but overlook the importance of communication efficiency to the resource-constrained drones. In order to fill this research gap, this paper proposes a lightweight aggregate authentication scheme (hereafter referred to as liteAGAP) to tackle the challenges of communication security and efficiency together. Specifically, liteAGAP utilizes cryptographic primitives such as physical unclonable function and bilinear pairing to efficiently secure the data exchange between the ground station and a group of drones in the IoD systems. To evaluate its security performance, liteAGAP is first implemented in the security-sensitive protocol modeling language. Then, we analyze and verify liteAGAP using AVISPA, which is a well-known Internet security protocol verification framework. We also implement liteAGAP and its counterpart schemes in a simulation environment, where the simulation-based experiments are conducted to obtain the results of communication overhead, running time, memory storage usage, and energy consumption. According to the results of security verification/analysis and performance evaluation, we conclude that not only liteAGAP meets the expected security requirements, but also provides superior performance compared to the existing schemes.

I. Tntroduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) applications normally consist of a set of immobile sensors, which are connected to the back-end data collection server via wired/wireless communication systems [1]. In recent years, drones have begun to efficiently replace connected sensors “at rest” with one device that is moveable within different environments, adequate to equip various sensors/devices, adaptable to diverse tasks, and intelligent to collect data on anything, anytime, and anywhere [2]. Inspired by the idea of IoT, there has been a constant effort to keep the momentum forward on the ubiquitous computing and bring forth an innovative aerial-ground communication architecture, which is termed the Internet of Drones (IoD) [3]. As drones are being integrated with other technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence), we will see more IoD systems/applications performing critical missions/tasks, especially where it is costly, risky or impractical for humans to perform [4]. In these scenarios, drones are able to complete missions/tasks in a more efficient and less risky manner [5]. In comparison with vehicular networks [6], where the road infrastructure restricts the movement of vehicles, the IoD drones are provided with more movement flexibility while executing missions/tasks in various areas of interest. Additionally, with the assistance of drones, a considerable amount of manpower can be released and the road traffic can be shifted to the airspace (i.e., thermal imaging and disinfecting drones for COVID-19 [7]), resulting in the improvement of transportation congestion and safety.