With the advent of Industry 5.0, humans will again take center stage in decision-making processes, fully supported by artificial intelligence (AI). Drone technology has been adopted in the industry to permit efficient monitoring, detection, and avoidance of hazardous regions during industrial processes. It gives rise to a network architecture, namely industrial internet of drones (IIoD), that is controlled and managed by human expertise. Collaborative IIoD services are conducted by two or more parties in different domains, e.g., mining, construction, etc. Since the communications are carried out via public network channels, privacy and security issues, especially the risks of quantum computing, are of utmost importance. Existing cryptographic approaches encounter several disadvantages, e.g., security vulnerabilities, poor usability, etc. Moreover, no user authentication mechanisms in the literature could provide a countermeasure to quantum attacks for the above communication. Based on lattice-based cryptography (LBC), this paper proposes an anti-quantum cross-server authentication (AQCSA) protocol for securing cross-domain communication of the collaborative services. Our work is designed with a multi-factor authentication mechanism to protect cross-server user-to-user (CS-U2U) and cross-server user-to-drone (CS-U2D) communications. We conduct some practical implementations and experiments to evaluate the security and efficiency of the AQCSA. It is proven that the protocol can withstand various attacks while achieving a reasonable implementation cost in CS-IIoD environments.
With the advent of Industry 5.0, humans will again take center stage in decision-making processes, fully supported by artificial intelligence (AI). Drone technology has been adopted in the industry to permit efficient monitoring, detection, and avoidance of hazardous regions during industrial processes. It gives rise to a network architecture, namely industrial internet of drones (IIoD), that is controlled and managed by human expertise. Collaborative IIoD services are conducted by two or more parties in different domains, e.g., mining, construction, etc. Since the communications are carried out via public network channels, privacy and security issues, especially the risks of quantum computing, are of utmost importance. Existing cryptographic approaches encounter several disadvantages, e.g., security vulnerabilities, poor usability, etc. Moreover, no user authentication mechanisms in the literature could provide a countermeasure to quantum attacks for the above communication. Based on lattice-based cryptography (LBC), this paper proposes an anti-quantum cross-server authentication (AQCSA) protocol for securing cross-domain communication of the collaborative services. Our work is designed with a multi-factor authentication mechanism to protect cross-server user-to-user (CS-U2U) and cross-server user-to-drone (CS-U2D) communications. We conduct some practical implementations and experiments to evaluate the security and efficiency of the AQCSA. It is proven that the protocol can withstand various attacks while achieving a reasonable implementation cost in CS-IIoD environments.
Modern societies increasingly rely on interconnected devices and individuals for information exchange and monitoring. In this manner, drones, as flying smart nodes in the wireless network ecosystem, facilitate diverse applications, such as industrial, civilian, and disaster response operations. However, the widespread adoption of drone networks introduces significant challenges regarding interoperability, privacy, and security. Advances in quantum computing exacerbate these issues by rendering classical cryptographic measures inadequate, necessitating the adoption of quantum-safe approaches. Existing solutions fail to address all potential threats or lack post-quantum security. This work sets out to propose a robust lattice-based authentication and communication protocol for drone networks, addressing these challenges. The protocol integrates dynamic credentials, timestamps, multi-factor authentication, and context information to enhance security. The scheme's security is analyzed using the DY and BPR models and formally verified via the AVISPA tool. Performance evaluations and comparisons with existing solutions demonstrate the protocol's functionality, showcasing a reasonable trade-off between security and performance. By leveraging modern cryptographic techniques, the proposed scheme ensures reliable and robust drone operations, effectively mitigating various attacks beyond session establishment while safeguarding privacy, and supporting dynamic network events.
The use of drones in military operations is a growing phenomenon that presents substantial security implications, especially related to authentication, data integrity, and the treatment of cyber threats. While traditional schemes like Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) have computational efficiency, they are susceptible to quantum attacks. To solve the aforementioned problem, in this paper, we design a Lightweight and Quantum Resistant Authentication Protocol for Military IoD Using Dilithium Signatures, which is a post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) method implemented using the PQC solution based on lattice-based cryptographic evidence. The proposed protocol provides quantum-safe mutual authentication of drones, soldiers, and the command center (CC) while also protecting against impersonation attacks and side-channel attacks. In contrast to ECC-based authentication and its vulnerability to Shor’s Algorithm, the proposed system is long-term quantum secure. While Dilithium incurs increased computational and communication costs, our performance evaluations show that it provides security against quantum adversaries and replay attacks, thereby deeming it a worthwhile choice, especially in light of the swift advancements in ASIC technology. In an effort to be truly efficient, signature compression, parallel authentication verification, and an improved key management approach further enhance the scalability of the proposed scheme in the military Internet of Drones (IoD) network. The results substantiate the necessity of deploying full post-quantum authentication schemes to protect UAV networks. We intend to focus on developing energy-saving hardware and optimizations for real-world deployment in future work.
The proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks and their numerous benefits in critical scenarios, UAV become crucial for Internet of Drones (IoD) operations. However, due to their communication methods, such as the micro-air-vehicle communication (MAVlink) protocol, wireless connections, and potentially insecure Internet channels, UAV networks are highly vulnerable to potentially lethal attacks. To overcome such issues, public key cryptographic techniques relying on integer factorization problem (IFP) and discrete logarithm problems (DLP) have been used form decades. However, with the significant advancements in quantum computing and adaptation of Shor's algorithm such cryptographic techniques based on IFP and DLP become insecure today and vulnerable to quantum attacks, which demand new ways of thinking about security. In this paper, we propose a quantum-secure access control protocol for UAV-based IoD applications, and its primary focus is on preserving user anonymity. A comprehensive security analysis validates the accuracy, security, and resilience against various active and passive attacks in both classical and quantum scenarios. A thorough formal security verification using the Scyther automated software validation tool to showcases the robustness of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, a real-time testbed experiment on Raspberry Pi 4 devices to assess the computational overhead of various cryptographic primitives demonstrates its practicality. Lastly, a detailed comparative performance evaluation, including authentication accuracy, performance under unknown attacks with existing related schemes illustrates its scalability and efficiency in real-world applications.
The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has connected billions of smart devices across healthcare, transportation, industrial automation, and smart home environments. While IoT has enhanced automation and data-driven decision-making, its widespread deployment has also increased the risk of cyberattacks. Conventional public-key cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks, particularly those based on Shor's algorithm. This paper proposes a Quantum-Resistant Cryptographic Framework (QRCF) for secure IoT communication using lattice-based cryptography integrated with lightweight authentication and efficient key management. The framework is designed to meet the computational limitations of IoT devices while ensuring long-term confidentiality and integrity. Performance evaluation demonstrates improvements in security resilience, authentication efficiency, and communication reliability compared with traditional cryptographic approaches. The proposed framework offers a scalable and future-ready solution for protecting IoT ecosystems in the post-quantum era.
Remotely-Controlled Aerial Vehicles (RCAV), popularly known as drones, have gained wide popularity in several applications from military to civilian due to the usage of sensors, actuators, and processors with wireless connectivity for data collection and processing. However, data security and authentication are still challenging as sensitive data is collected and shared in RCAV using an open channel, i.e., the Internet. The existing security of Internet-of-Drones (IoD) communication mainly depends on the hardness of discrete logarithms and factorization problems. However, due to Shor's algorithm, both authorized and secure transmissions are challenging in the presence of highly scalable quantum computers. To mitigate the aforementioned issues and challenges, in this article, we propose an authorized and secure communication scheme for IoD based on Ring Learning With Error (RLWE) problem on lattices, which have the potential to sustain low computation and quantum attacks. The proposed scheme supports mutual authentication and has an efficient session establishment. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme has superior performance as compared to the existing state-of-the-art solutions on benchmark data sets using various evaluation metrics.
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.