Provably Secure Session Key Agreement Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Packet Exchanges

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) convey secret data that belongs to the military, individual or organizations. As such, privacy and security protection of this data is critical. To accomplish this, many protocols have been presented based on techniques such as dynamic keys, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), public key cryptosystems, bilinear pairing, certificate-less group keys and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). However, some of these schemes have long session keys and hence high computational and communication complexities, while others fail to address most pertinent attack vectors in UAV networks. In this paper, a provably secure session key agreement protocol is developed. The security analysis shows that it offers backward and forward key secrecy, strong anonymity, and can withstand impersonation, replay, privileged insider and side-channeling attacks. In terms of bandwidth requirements, the proposed protocol has the least bandwidth requirements among other related protocols. On the other hand, it requires average execution time during the key agreement and authentication phases.