R3ACWU: A Lightweight, Trustworthy Authentication Scheme for UAV-Assisted IoT Applications

The technology of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has sparked a revolution in numerous Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as flood monitoring, wildfire monitoring, coastal area surveillance, intelligent transportation, and classified military operations, etc. This technology offers several advantages when used as a flying base station to enhance the communication metrics of an employed IoT appplication. However, as an integrated technology (UAV-assisted IoT applications), it suffers from many challenges, and security is one of the foremost concerns. Considering that, in this paper, we proposed a hybrid lightweight key exchange authentication model for UAV-assisted IoT applications to resolve the device-to-device (D2D) authentication and data privacy issues in these networks. The proposed model employs five different security parameters named registration, authentication, authorization, accounting, and cache wash and update (R3ACWU) in coordination with a hash function. The network architecture consists of UAVs, IoT devices, and micro base stations, followed by base stations, authentication servers, and service providers (SP). In this framework, we introduce a concept known as ‘dead time’, a specific time period after which each device’s cache memory is cleared and updated. This practice not only enhances the security of the devices in use but also reduces computational and memory overhead by eliminating the records of devices that haven’t participated in the communication process within the specified time frame. Results statistics of our lightweight R3ACWU authentication scheme exhibit notable improvement corresponded to the present authentication schemes in terms of comparative parameters.