Abstract As mobile internet and Internet of Things technologies continue to advance, the application scenarios of peer-to-peer Internet of Drones (IoD) are becoming increasingly diverse. However, the development of IoD also faces significant challenges, such as security, privacy protection, and limited computing power, which require technological innovation to overcome. For group secure communication, it is necessary to provide two basic services, user authentication and group key agreement. Due to the limited storage of IoD devices, group key negotiation requires lightweight calculations, and conventional schemes cannot satisfy the requirements of group communication in the IoD. To this end, a new lightweight communication scheme based on ring neighbors is presented in this paper for IoD, which not only realizes the identity verification of user and group key negotiation, but also improves computational efficiency on each group member side. A detailed security analysis substantiates that the designed scheme is capable of withstanding attacks from both internal and external adversaries while satisfying all defined security requirements. More importantly, in our proposal, the computational cost on the user side remains unaffected by the variability of the number of members participating in group communication, as members communicate in a non-interactive manner through broadcasting. As a result, the protocol proposed in this article demonstrates lower computational and communication costs in comparison to other cryptographic schemes. Hence, this proposal presents a more appealing approach to lightweight group key agreement protocol with user authentication for application in the IoD.
Abstract As mobile internet and Internet of Things technologies continue to advance, the application scenarios of peer-to-peer Internet of Drones (IoD) are becoming increasingly diverse. However, the development of IoD also faces significant challenges, such as security, privacy protection, and limited computing power, which require technological innovation to overcome. For group secure communication, it is necessary to provide two basic services, user authentication and group key agreement. Due to the limited storage of IoD devices, group key negotiation requires lightweight calculations, and conventional schemes cannot satisfy the requirements of group communication in the IoD. To this end, a new lightweight communication scheme based on ring neighbors is presented in this paper for IoD, which not only realizes the identity verification of user and group key negotiation, but also improves computational efficiency on each group member side. A detailed security analysis substantiates that the designed scheme is capable of withstanding attacks from both internal and external adversaries while satisfying all defined security requirements. More importantly, in our proposal, the computational cost on the user side remains unaffected by the variability of the number of members participating in group communication, as members communicate in a non-interactive manner through broadcasting. As a result, the protocol proposed in this article demonstrates lower computational and communication costs in comparison to other cryptographic schemes. Hence, this proposal presents a more appealing approach to lightweight group key agreement protocol with user authentication for application in the IoD.
With the increasing demand for drones in diverse tasks, the Internet of Drones (IoD) has recently emerged as a significant technology in academia and industry. The IoD environment enables various services, such as traffic and environmental monitoring, disaster situation management, and military operations. However, IoD communication is vulnerable to security threats due to the exchange of sensitive information over insecure public channels. Moreover, public key-based cryptographic schemes are impractical for communication with resource-constrained drones due to their limited computational capability and resource capacity. Therefore, a secure and lightweight key agreement scheme must be developed while considering the characteristics of the IoD environment. In 2024, Alzahrani proposed a secure key agreement protocol for securing the IoD environment. However, Alzahrani’s protocol suffers from high computational overhead due to its reliance on elliptic curve cryptography and is vulnerable to drone and mobile user impersonation attacks and session key disclosure attacks by eavesdropping on public-channel messages. Therefore, this work proposes a lightweight and security-enhanced key agreement scheme for the IoD environment to address the limitations of Alzahrani’s protocol. The proposed protocol employs a physical unclonable function and simple cryptographic operations (XOR and hash functions) to achieve high security and efficiency. This work demonstrates the security of the proposed protocol using informal security analysis. This work also conducted formal security analysis using the Real-or-Random (RoR) model, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation to verify the proposed protocol’s session key security, mutual authentication ability, and resistance to replay and MITM attacks, respectively. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that the proposed protocol offers better performance and security by comparing the computational and communication costs and security features with those of relevant protocols.
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.
Recently, drones have gained significant importance in various fields, such as military applications, healthcare, smart agriculture, and traffic monitoring. Equipped with embedded systems capable of sensing, collecting, and transmitting data in real time via public communication channels, drones enable the flow of confidential and sensitive information into cyberspace. However, this poses a risk of data being compromised during transmission over unsecured public channels. To mitigate such risks, many mutual authentication schemes have been proposed. Nevertheless, existing solutions still face security and performance limitations. In response, we propose the design of two lightweight and secure remote user authentication protocols and a key agreement for the Internet of Drones (IoD) environment. The first protocol, P-I, allows users and drones to mutually authenticate each other, establishing a secure and reliable connection. The second protocol, P-II, serves to re-authenticate authorized users, achieving a balance between security and performance. Both protocols utilize hash functions to enhance security and efficiency. We analyze the proposed protocols and conduct an informal security analysis and performance evaluation, focusing on security features, computational overhead, and communication efficiency. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed protocols outperform existing solutions by meeting all security requirements, achieving effective re-authentication, resisting both active and passive attacks, and providing suitable performance for IoD environments.
The existing authentication and key agreement (AKA) schemes for the internet of drones (IoD) still suffer from various security attacks and fail to ensure required security properties. Moreover, drones generally have limited memory and computation capability. Motivated by these issues, a secure and lightweight AKA protocol for IoD (SLAKA-IoD) is proposed based on physical unclonable function (PUF), “exclusive or” (XOR) operation and hash function, which are simple cryptographic operations and functions that can provide better performance. In the SLAKA-IoD protocol, a drone and the ground station (GS) perform mutual authentication and establish a secure session key between them, and any two drones can also perform mutual authentication and establish a secure session key between them. Via informal security analysis, formal security analysis using the strand space model, and security verification based on the Scyther tool, the SLAKA-IoD protocol is proven to resist various security attacks and ensure required security properties. Further comparative analysis shows that the SLAKA-IoD protocol can provide more security features, and is generally lightweight as compared with these related AKA protocols for IoD, so it is suitable for IoD.
In an Internet of drone (IoD) network, a low-power drone intends to access a strong controller to obtain some services. The basic security requirements for an IoD are user authentication and key establishment. With the user authentication, an unauthorized drone can access the controller and get the services. With the key establishment, the drone and the controller can communicate in a secure way. Currently, some authenticated key establishment (AKE) protocols were designed. However, many of them are homogeneous, in which both sides of communication belong to public key infrastructure (PKI) or identity-based cryptosystem (IBC) or certificateless public key cryptosystem (CL-PKC). Such design does not follow the characteristic in the IoD. In this paper, we design a heterogeneous authenticated key establishment protocol for an IoD. In our design, the drone is in IBC environment and the controller is in CLC environment. Compared with previous works, our design has the lowest computational cost and communication cost.
The use of Internet of Drones (IoD) technology has surged across various domains such as logistics, surveying, industrial inspections, emergency response, security, infrastructure monitoring, crop management, and more. However, real-time communication with drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the IoD environment occurs over an insecure open channel, making it susceptible to various security and privacy vulnerabilities, including unauthorized access, data interception, denial of service attacks, and privacy concerns. Due to their unique characteristics, including long transmission distances, unstable communication environments, resource limitations, and the highly dynamic nature of UAVs, ensuring the security and privacy of IoD systems is of paramount importance for the success of IoD-based applications. Furthermore, drones are resource-constrained devices, and employing expensive security solutions is impractical, as it would significantly reduce the operational capacity of drones. In this paper, we present the design of an ultralightweight, secure, and robust user-authenticated key agreement framework for the IoD environment, named USAF-IoD. The proposed USAF-IoD is developed by incorporating authenticated encryption (ASCON), cryptographic hashing, XOR operations, and the use of physical unclonable functions (PUFs). PUFs are employed to enhance resistance against physical tampering attacks. The security analysis reveals that the proposed USAF-IoD meets the essential security requirements of the IoD environment. The comparative analysis further highlights the effectiveness of the proposed USAF-IoD, notably excelling in terms of security and functionality characteristics when compared to existing benchmark schemes, and showcasing competitive performance in computation, communication, and energy overheads.