CSAP-IoD: A Chaotic Map-Based Secure Authentication Protocol for Internet of Drones

Internet of Drones (IoD) provides a new mode of information collection and data transmission. With the assistance of 6G mobile communication facilities and artificial intelligence technology, the IoD system progressively enables real-time communication among remote users, ground control centers and drone clusters. At the same time, the dynamically updated, open, and interoperable communication environment also poses some risks to the IoD system’s security and privacy. The security attributes of the IoD system are insufficiently met by the authentication schemes currently in use. In light of the aforementioned factors, this paper suggests CSAP-IoD, a lightweight secure communication protocol for anonymous interactions that uses the initial value sensitivity and orbital unpredictability of chaotic map. It utilizes fuzzy verifier technology to achieve three-factor security and facilitates mutual authentication and key agreement among the three-party communicating entities of IoD. Real-or-Random (ROR) model, informal security analysis, and the Scyther tool are used to assess the protocol’s security in multiple dimensions, and it has been demonstrated that CSAP-IoD can withstand a variety of attacks. Based on simulation results and a detailed comparison with state-of-the-art IoD communication protocols in terms of security features, computation cost, communication cost, and energy consumption, CSAP-IoD shows the optimal security performance while emphasizing the efficiency advantage, offering a dependable solution to guarantee the information security of IoD system communication.