A Redactable Blockchain-Assisted Application-Aware Authentication System for Internet of Drones

The Internet of Drones (IoD) has latterly started to gear up its applications in diverse sectors of the society as a result of high adaptability and adjustability to new circumstances. Security, privacy, and storage issues still remain as major barriers for next-generation IoD systems to meet their general applicability requirements, even though many one-key-for-all static authentication and append-only blockchain-assisted systems have been proposed by the IoD community. First, bearing channel bandwidth and drones’ resource constraints in mind, authentication protocols with less computation and communication overhead are preferable. Second, the IoD drones might collect different types of data simultaneously, a unique secret session key for each type of data is needed to prevent data leakage from unauthorized parties. Third, the permanent storage of each drone’s cryptographic and task information on the append-only blockchain raises significantly alert after a long period of operation and/or an exponential growth of drones. Motivated by the research challenges presented above, we propose a redactable blockchain-assisted application-aware authentication system, also referred to as ReBAS, for next-generation IoD applications, where the drones shuttle back and forth between different flying zones to collect diverse types of data. The Chebyshev polynomial, redactable consortium blockchain, and chameleon hash function are adopted to significantly minimize the computational, communication, and storage overheads of cryptography-related operations. According to the security verification, and formal and informal security analysis, the ReBAS not only guarantees secure and dynamic authenticated key establishment but also is in compliance with the security requirements of Canetti-Krawczyk adversarial framework. We also develop a rigorous simulation framework and conduct an extensive comparative study. The experimental results demonstrate that the ReBAS can minimize the overheads in computation, communication, and storage while enhancing scalability.