PUF based Authentication and Key Agreement Framework for Internet of Drones

The Internet of Drones (IoD) allows synchronized communication to unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). The continuous downsizing of sensing devices, controllers, and processors, along with widespread mobile communications, make drones a potential alternative for a wide range of real-time applications. The drones are used in farmland, surveillance, and traffic management systems in smart cities. The IoD applications are generally real-time and people often look for factual data via drones of a specific fly zone. The factual information can be shared when we enable individuals to directly obtain actual information from flying drones within the IoD context rather than via the server. It may lead to some security vulnerabilities that may impair the efficiency of the implemented protocol within that IoD environment. Secure exchange of information over a wireless communication channel is possible when a session key is exchanged among the users and the drones. To overcome the security limitations of wireless transmission of the data several approaches are suggested in the literature to carry out mutual authentication and share session key in the IoD environment. However, the existing approaches are vulnerable to session key disclosure, drone physical capture, and impersonation attacks. Hence, a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based lightweight authentication framework is proposed to protect the IoD environment from security attacks. The proposed framework is safe from replay, drone capture, impersonation, and session key disclosure attacks according to comprehensive security verification that uses the widely acknowledged AVISPA tool and informal security assessment. The performance statistics indicate that the proposed technique is effective based on different criteria and delivers more protection than existing relevant schemes.