Drone-MAP: A Novel Authentication Scheme for Drone-Assisted 5G Networks

Drones, also called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are attracting significant attention in the research community for their many military and civil uses. They are especially being deployed for assistance in 5G communication networks. As a particular technology starts to gain widespread applicability, it is crucial that it becomes resistant to malicious entities. In particular, the communication between UAVs and the 5G-base station needs to be secured without leaking sensitive information to any unauthorized entities. The constraints on UAV in terms of computation time, impose the condition that any authentication protocol required for authenticating the UAV with the 5G base station must be lightweight in order to be feasible for deployment. To address this issue, a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-based mutual authentication scheme is proposed in this paper. Security analysis of the proposed protocol and a computation time comparison with state-of-the-art authentication protocol in the same field are also presented.