A Privacy-Preserving Access Control Protocol for Consumer Flying Vehicles in Smart City Applications

The Internet of Drones (IoD) offers supervised admittance to drones in a targeted fly zone as the byproduct of the Internet of Things (IoT). The term drone is the trendy alias for intelligent flying vehicle (IFV). The contemporary sensing, processing, and connectivity services enrich the use of drones in many civilian and military applications. In these applications, consumers can acquire real-time information directly from flying drones in a smart city environment. While this feature undeniably empowers consumers, it poses significant security risks due to the direct access privilege. We propose an anonymous protocol for consumer flying vehicles within smart city applications to mitigate these threats. The proposed protocol utilizes a physically unclonable function to sustain the physical security of flying vehicles. We ratify our protocol’s security fortitude and persistence through inclusive security analysis. We demonstrate the performance evaluation under diverse performance metrics, which shows that the proposed protocol achieves 40.69% and 17.91% efficiency as compared to related protocols in terms of computation and communication cost comparison, respectively.