BioKA-ASVN: Biometric-Based Key Agreement Scheme for Air Smart Vehicular Networks Using Blockchain Service

Air Smart Vehicular Networks (ASVNs) have become increasingly essentials in military and commercial industries in recent years, where drones are deployed to interact among each other via wireless medium in airspace due to their agility and versatility. ASVNs can form a closed loop from data perception to final execution by integrating communication devices, computation tools, and control modules. However, the used unencrypted and publicly available navigational signals like Global Positioning System (GPS) and communication over (public) insecure Internet connections, including wireless networks and WiFi, make ASVNs vulnerable to security breaches. Attackers can easily gain access to a drone's configuration and take control remotely, by launching various attacks such as GPS spoofing, false sensor data injection, maldrone malware injection, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle, Denial-of-Service (DoS), replay, forgery, and Skyjack attacks. This paper proposes a robust and efficient multi-factor biometric-based security mechanism using blockchain as a service to address the security and privacy breaches in ASVNs. A comparative study demonstrates that the proposed scheme provides superior security and better functionality features with low communication and computation overheads as compared to the existing analogous schemes. The feasibility of the proposed scheme in real-life drone applications is also demonstrated through a real-time testbed and blockchain simulation. Furthermore, a detailed security analysis using the automated software validation tool, namely Scyther, verifies the proposed scheme's significant level of security.