The accelerated uptake of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has significantly altered communication and data exchange landscapes but has also introduced substantial security challenges, especially in open-access UAV communication environments. To address these, Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) offers robust security with computational efficiency, ideal for resource-constrained Internet of Drones (IoD) systems. This study proposes a Secure and Efficient Three-Way Key Exchange (SETKE) protocol using ECC, specifically tailored for IoD. The SETKE protocol’s security was rigorously analyzed within an extended Bellare–Pointcheval–Rogaway (BPR) model under the random oracle assumption, demonstrating its resilience. Formal verification using the AVISPA tool confirmed the protocol’s safety against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, and formal proofs establish its Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) security. In terms of performance, SETKE is highly efficient, requiring only 3 ECC scalar multiplications for the Service Requester drone, 4 for the Service Provider drone, and 3 for the Control Server, which is demonstrably lower than several existing schemes. My approach achieves this robust protection with minimal communication overhead (e.g., a maximum payload of 844 bits per session), ensuring its practicality for resource-limited IoD environments. The significance of this work for the IoD field lies in providing a provably secure, lightweight, and computationally efficient key exchange mechanism vital for addressing critical security challenges in IoD systems.
The accelerated uptake of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has significantly altered communication and data exchange landscapes but has also introduced substantial security challenges, especially in open-access UAV communication environments. To address these, Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) offers robust security with computational efficiency, ideal for resource-constrained Internet of Drones (IoD) systems. This study proposes a Secure and Efficient Three-Way Key Exchange (SETKE) protocol using ECC, specifically tailored for IoD. The SETKE protocol’s security was rigorously analyzed within an extended Bellare–Pointcheval–Rogaway (BPR) model under the random oracle assumption, demonstrating its resilience. Formal verification using the AVISPA tool confirmed the protocol’s safety against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, and formal proofs establish its Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) security. In terms of performance, SETKE is highly efficient, requiring only 3 ECC scalar multiplications for the Service Requester drone, 4 for the Service Provider drone, and 3 for the Control Server, which is demonstrably lower than several existing schemes. My approach achieves this robust protection with minimal communication overhead (e.g., a maximum payload of 844 bits per session), ensuring its practicality for resource-limited IoD environments. The significance of this work for the IoD field lies in providing a provably secure, lightweight, and computationally efficient key exchange mechanism vital for addressing critical security challenges in IoD systems.
A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle, which is deployed in a particular Fly Zone (FZ), and used to collect crucial information from its surrounding environment to be transmitted to the server for further processing. Generally, a Mobile User (MU) is required to access the real-time information collected by the drone stationed in a specific FZ securely. Therefore, to ensure secure and reliable communications an Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocol is imperative to the Internet of Drone (IoD) environment. An AKE scheme ensures only authentic MU to access IoD network resources. Upon successful authentication, MU and drone can set up a secret session key for secure communication in the future. This paper presents a novel Lightweight AKE Protocol for IoD Environment (LAKE-IoD), which first ensures the authenticity of MU and also renders session key establishment mechanism between MU and drone with the help of a server. LAKE-IoD is an AKE protocol, which is based on an authenticated encryption scheme AEGIS, hash function, and bit-wise XOR operation. Meticulous formal security verification by employing a software tool known as Scyther and informal security analysis demonstrates that LAKE-IoD is protected against different well-known active and passive security attacks. Additionally, Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic is applied to verify the logical completeness of LAKE-IoD. Furthermore, a comparison of LAKE-IoD with the related schemes shows that LAKE-IoD incurs less communication, computational and storage overhead.
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.
Internet of Drones (IoD) is the interconnection of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones deployed for collecting sensitive data to be used in critical applications. The drones transmit the collected data to the control room (CR) for analysis, while CR sends control commands to the drone to monitor their operations. This exchange of information between the drones and CR takes place through a wireless communication channel, which is susceptible to various security risks. Therefore, it is vital to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of such information in the IoD environment. To this end, authenticated key management (AKM) protocols can be leveraged to provide reliable and secure communication. However, due to the peculiarities associated with IoD environments, it is challenging to devise a robust and resource-efficient AKM protocol. To tackle this challenge, in this article, we propose a robust AKM protocol for IoD (RAMP-IoD). RAMP-IoD uses lightweight cryptography-based authenticated encryption primitive and elliptic-curve cryptography along with a hash function to perform the AKM process. Moreover, RAMP-IoD verifies the user’s authenticity and then sets up a session key (SK) between the user and a specific drone for indecipherable communications. We verify the security of SK using the random oracle model. Scyther-based validation demonstrates that RAMP-IoD is protected against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Moreover, the informal analysis illustrates that RAMP-IoD is secure against various covert security attacks. Through a comparative study, we also demonstrate that RAMP-IoD provides enhanced security with low storage, communication, and computational overheads as compared to related AKM protocols.
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 rapid advance of manufacturing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, aka drones) has led to a rise in the use of their civilian and commercial applications. The access of these drones to controlled airspace can be efficiently coordinated through particular layered network architecture, often referred to as the Internet-of-Drones (IoD). The nature of IoD, which is deployed in an open-access environment, brings significant safety and security concerns. Classical cryptosystems such as elliptic curve cryptography, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, and Diffie-Hellman are essential building blocks to secure communication in the IoD. However, with the rapid development of quantum computing, it will be easy to break public-key cryptosystems using efficient quantum algorithms like Shor’s algorithm. Thus, building quantum-safe solutions to enhance IoD security has become imperative. Fortunately, quantum technologies can provide unconditional security solutions to protect data and communications in the IoD environment. This paper proposes a quantum-based scheme to prevent unauthorized drones from accessing a specific flight zone and authenticates the identities and shared secret messages of involved entities. To do so, we used a quantum channel to encode the private information based on a pre-shared key and a random key generated in session. The involved entities also perform mutual authentication and share a secret key. We also provide the security proofs and analysis of the proposed scheme that indicates its resistance to well-known attacks.
The Internet of Drones (IoD) brings an unprecedented prospect for massive aerial data acquisition; on the other hand, it meets severe hindrances in how to accomplish robust, secure, and economic identity authentication with the limited resources available. In this paper, ChebIoD (Chebyshev polynomial-based mutual authentication and session key generation) is proposed as a new mutual authentication and session key agreement protocol for IoD environments. ChebIoD differs from the existing methods of blockchain, PUF, and ECC in that it consolidates three elaborate mechanisms: (a) post-quantum-oriented design methodology; (b) a dynamic solution for key update/revocation scheme; and (c) formal verification using BAN logic, Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, and AVISPA. The principal difference is that we are able to assign a precise definition of security for key privacy; namely, the protocol achieves both forward and backward secrecy along with performance gains for lightweight polynomial computations without requiring exponential hard assumptions. An Enhanced Security Assessment covers side-channel threats as well as the robustness of the Trusted Authority. We also show an updated performance comparison to the IoD-specific AKE protocols and state-of-the-art schemes in recent works on Blockchain-, Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-, and Chebyshev-based approaches. In identical simulation settings, ChebIoD decreases computation time by up to 63.5%, reduces communication overhead by up to 62.4%, and lowers energy consumption by up to 66.7%, compared to state-of-the-art solutions. These improvements are consistent across multiple baselines, though the exact gains vary depending on the compared protocol. The practical utility is showcased by actual IoD projects for disaster response, precision agriculture, and urban air mobility solutions. Overall, ChebIoD demonstrates efficient and scalable authentication for IoD under simulation.