An Enhanced Certificateless Blockchain-Assisted Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Internet of Drones

The consumer drone market has grown rapidly, making it necessary to integrate drones with the internet to explore low-altitude areas. Internet of Drones (IoD) offers a more potent data stream to connect the global Big Data system, it will also have to deal with the issue of exposure and malicious use of flight trajectory, communication data, and identity information when a cyber attacker unlawfully eavesdrops, gains access to, attacks, or even takes control of drones. Numerous authentication protocols have been developed for the IoD context in order to solve the aforementioned issues. Ali et al. provide a cross-domain communication scheme (henceforth known as the AJ protocol) in IoD environment by utilizing blockchain-assisted authentication to improve the security of IoD data transmission. Nevertheless, this scheme is vulnerable to key compromise impersonation attack and fails to achieve the crucial security attribute of anonymity. In order to address the aforementioned security concerns, we develop an enhanced certificateless authentication and key agreement (CL-AKA) protocol in IoD environment, based on blockchain technology and Chebyshev chaotic mapping. Our protocol can achieve necessary security attributes for IoD and withstand a variety of known attacks, as demonstrated by proof of security under the eCK model and automated validation by the Scyther tool. Additionally, our protocol performs better in terms of computation and communication overhead when compared to similar protocols to achieve lightweight anonymous authentication.