USAF-IoD: Ultralightweight and Secure Authenticated Key Agreement Framework for Internet of Drones Environment

The use of Internet of Drones (IoD) technology has surged across various domains such as logistics, surveying, industrial inspections, emergency response, security, infrastructure monitoring, crop management, and more. However, real-time communication with drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the IoD environment occurs over an insecure open channel, making it susceptible to various security and privacy vulnerabilities, including unauthorized access, data interception, denial of service attacks, and privacy concerns. Due to their unique characteristics, including long transmission distances, unstable communication environments, resource limitations, and the highly dynamic nature of UAVs, ensuring the security and privacy of IoD systems is of paramount importance for the success of IoD-based applications. Furthermore, drones are resource-constrained devices, and employing expensive security solutions is impractical, as it would significantly reduce the operational capacity of drones. In this paper, we present the design of an ultralightweight, secure, and robust user-authenticated key agreement framework for the IoD environment, named USAF-IoD. The proposed USAF-IoD is developed by incorporating authenticated encryption (ASCON), cryptographic hashing, XOR operations, and the use of physical unclonable functions (PUFs). PUFs are employed to enhance resistance against physical tampering attacks. The security analysis reveals that the proposed USAF-IoD meets the essential security requirements of the IoD environment. The comparative analysis further highlights the effectiveness of the proposed USAF-IoD, notably excelling in terms of security and functionality characteristics when compared to existing benchmark schemes, and showcasing competitive performance in computation, communication, and energy overheads.