A heterogeneous authenticated key establishment protocol for Internet of drones

In an Internet of drone (IoD) network, a low-power drone intends to access a strong controller to obtain some services. The basic security requirements for an IoD are user authentication and key establishment. With the user authentication, an unauthorized drone can access the controller and get the services. With the key establishment, the drone and the controller can communicate in a secure way. Currently, some authenticated key establishment (AKE) protocols were designed. However, many of them are homogeneous, in which both sides of communication belong to public key infrastructure (PKI) or identity-based cryptosystem (IBC) or certificateless public key cryptosystem (CL-PKC). Such design does not follow the characteristic in the IoD. In this paper, we design a heterogeneous authenticated key establishment protocol for an IoD. In our design, the drone is in IBC environment and the controller is in CLC environment. Compared with previous works, our design has the lowest computational cost and communication cost.